Today’s Wall Street Journal has this splendid pieceby GMU econ prof Russ Roberts.

He discusses the similarities between 1932 and 2008, and the harm that comes from politicians who feel compelled to play an active role in “rescuing” the economy and then controlling it so things will be better in the future. But they won’t be; the steady ratcheting up of political domination of the economy (and indeed all of society) guarantees more crises.

If Obama and his leftist allies sweep the election, it probably means the completion of the project they began in 1933, namely turning the United States into another social democracy where the state holds the “commanding heights” of socio-economic power and the people have to be content with whatever scraps of liberty are left to them. Before the New Deal, the US was a country where freedom of action was the norm, with just a few spots where you had to get government permission to do what you wanted to. That’s been gradually changing, but the mindset of the Obamaites seems to be that of hard-edged authoritarians who want to make government control the norm.

The socialists have succeeded in taking control of most of the world, but the US has remained outside their orbit. Capturing the US would be equivalent to taking the enemy queen in a chess game. The world’s last big source of economic vitality would be smothered under a blanket of egalitarian and environmentalist controls. Then what?

With socialist health care in the US, where will Canadians go when they need operations and can’t wait for their turn in the queue? For that matter, where will we go?

With entrepreneurship stifled in the US, where will new products and technologies be developed?

If the US becomes bigger version of France, where will the world’s ambitious, talented people go if they’re looking for freedom to succeed?