"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...

The Shrine of FDR

Great piece from Jonah Goldberg on the cult of FDR and the liberal infatuation with the New Deal.

The glory of the New Deal is, for liberals, settled dogma. To question it is akin to casting doubt on geocentrism in the 14th century. Worse, it is an attempt to erase liberalism’s most usable past.

It ran in National Review last week, but has been updated and posted. I recommend it.

Hiding in plain sight

Two UCLA economists claim to have figured out what my Grandmother, who lived through the depression, taught my father 50 years ago, and he taught me, and I've taught my kids; the New Deal didn't end the depression, World War II did. The New Deal exacerbated the Great Depression, and the "FDR saved the country from the depression" propaganda is just that - propaganda.

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

"Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump," said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA's Department of Economics. "We found that a relapse isn't likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies."

This is, of course, a "great mystery" of the same sort as the Kennedy assassination - it's a mystery only to those with an emotional interest in a storyline that isn't the real story...