Two recently-published books take opposite corners in the “was FDR a great president” battle. Jim Powell’s book FDR’s Follies is an excellent account of the leftist (actually “fascist,” since Mussolini was revered by many members of FDR’s so-called Brain Trust) interventions that wrecked any chance for economic recovery back in the 1930s — and still linger as economic millstones around our necks. Conrad Black, a newspaper owner from Canada, however, has recently penned a ponderous (over 1200 pages!) tome purporting to defend FDR. Powell’s take on the controversy is available here.
Here’s a point that, to my knowledge, Powell doesn’t make and is conveniently overlooked by the FDR defenders: Throughout our history, we suffered through quite a number of economic recessions and depressions, or “panics” as they used to be called. Rothbard convincingly argues that every one was due to governmental monetary finagling, but the key point is that they were all over within two years, and often less. The sharp, post World War I recession, for example, hit the country in 1921, but we were fortunate enough to have had a president (Harding) with no interest in governmental activism. The Great Depression became “great” only because of the interventionism of Hoover and FDR, whose efforts to cure the depression turned it from what would have been a short contraction into one lasting a decade.
