"It is the mistakes, multiple, of both periods..."

Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man and an expert on the great depression, has an excellent piece on some of the parallels between 1937 and today. That Time magazine photoshop of Obama as FDR may be even more accurate than we previously suspected...

To make employment less expensive, the government can undo the health-care law, our modern version of the Wagner Act, so that employers needn't worry that hiring implies accepting costs they can't control or even predict. Another boost to hiring would be a more reasonable National Labor Relations Board, not the current one, which chases companies such as Boeing Co. around the equivalent of Keynes's lot trying to drive up wages. Another would be to cut taxes for employers, big and small. Uncertainty would diminish if both parties publicly committed to a smaller and less intrusive government.

The problem isn't a single "Mistake of 1937" or "Mistake of 2011." It is the mistakes, multiple, of both periods.

Read it all...