The Forgotten Man

Amity Shlaes has written a book that everyone in the Age of Obama needs to read, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (Harper Perennial, 2007). I found the similarities between FDR and Obama to be almost creepy. Both were/are meglomaniacs, both were/are anti-business, both had/have an unwavering faith in the ability of government to solve problems, and both were/are responsible for untold economic damage to the country.

In the afterword to the paperback edition, Shlaes sums up her conclusion as follows:

But what really stands out when you step back from the 1930s picture is not how much the New Deal public works achieved. It is how little. Notwithstanding the largest peacetime appropriation in the history of the world, the New Deal recovery remained incomplete right through the 1930s. From 1934 on - the period when the spending ramped up - monetary troubles remained. But they could not take all the blame for the Depression. The story of the mid-1930s is the story of a heroic economy struggling to recuperate but failing to do so because of perverse federal policy. the worst factor was Roosevelt's war on business. But one can also make the argument that lawmakers' preoccupation with public works got in the way of allowing productive businesses to expand and pull the rest forward.

Blaming business and fanning the flames of class warfare are the strategies of the Obama administration, as we saw in the past week in their unbelievable cynical attacks on the Chamber of Congress. When business understandably becomes nervous about investing, the economy gets worse and the attacks are stepped up. A vicious cycle is created. This recession will not end until the Democrats are out of power and confidence in a stable regulatory and tax environment is restored.

Shlaes' book contains so many parallels between the 30s and the past few years that it is almost depressing. Obama does not have a single new idea; everything he proposes comes out of the failed playbook of Hoover, who made the Depression possible, and Roosevelt, who unnecessarily prolonged it. How he can accuse his political opponents of wanting to go back to the past with a straight face is impossible to understand.