The great depression

Yesterday I finished reading The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes. The policies of the New Deal, which Franklin D. Roosevelt pursued throughout the 1930s, never did bring unemployment down or otherwise resolve the Great Depression, and yet it is scary to observe the parallels between what was tried and failed then and what is being proposed in our own time.

Several weeks earlier I finished reading FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, by Jim Powell. "In the minds of historians and the American public alike, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of our greatest presidents, not least because he supposedly saved America from the Great Depression," explains the back cover of the book. "But as historian Jim Powell reveals in this groundbreaking book, Roosevelt's New Deal policies actually prolonged and exacerbated the economic disaster, swelled the federal government, and prevented the country from turning around quickly."

"The next time economic cataclysm looms," wrote the National Review when this book was first published in 2003, "leaders should read Jim Powell's book." Well, the economic cataclysm is upon us again. I really hope President Obama and his advisers, along with our elected officials in Congress, have read the book. And heed its message. Or the days ahead could be nastier than they really need to be.

As George Santayana (1863-1952) wrote in 1905, more than a century ago: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (Life of Reason, Or The Phases of Human Progress: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, 1:284).