Posted on 04/21/2009 4:38:49 AM PDT by rightwingintelligentsia
There aren’t any sex scenes or vampires, and it won’t help you lose weight.
But House Republicans are tearing through the pages of Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man” like soccer moms before book club night.
Shlaes’ 2007 take on the Great Depression questions the success of the New Deal and takes issue with the value of government intervention in a major economic crisis — red meat for a party hungry for empirical evidence that the Democrats’ spending plans won’t end the current recession.
“There aren’t many books that take a negative look at the New Deal,” explained Republican policy aide Mike Ference, whose boss, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia, invited Shlaes to join a group of 20 or so other House Republicans for lunch earlier this year in his Capitol suite.
“Republicans are gobbling it up — and so are other lawmakers — because it tells you what they did, what worked and what didn’t.”
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
This is on my list to get.
I’m schlepping through the 5000 year leap right now.
I would also suggest “FDR’s Folly” , “Wilson’s War” and “Bully Boy” by Jim Powell
I’m intrigued by Glen Beck’s theory about the progressive movement. I think he’s on to something.
Much more reading and research required.
BINGO!
Speaking of Devouring-
Amity Shlaes:
“The government is like a lobster. It will eat anything, it wants to survive, it will compete with anything, and it can be a cannibal. When you look back at the ’30s using the public choice lens, what you discover is the extent to which the Depression wasn’t about a virtuous government and bad businesspeople. Rather, it was about people in office competing with the private sector for power.”
I'm sure there are vampires in it; Amity just doesn't know who they are to identify them.
And any book will help you lose weight, if you read it on the treadmill, or even in a recliner while *not eating*!
FDR’s Folly is a great book — exhaustively and brilliantly researched, and very detailed.
LOL!
What we need is a new vampire series.
Good honest people get elected - but once they get to DC - they seem to “change” into something else.
What REALLY is going on at those cocktail parties?
I’ll add them to the list.
Excellent book. Well documented and scholarly with plenty of references in the bibliography.
Truth will hurt liberals. We just need to keep the truth at the forefront, not like the MSM who seek to hide or distort the truth.
Here it is on amazon for $9.57:
http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Man-History-Great-Depression/dp/0060936428
The author adds a couple of cogent comments farther down the page.
Dr. Burton Folsom of Hillsdale College released ‘New Deal or Raw Deal’ last February and I would recommend it as well. He was on Glenn Beck a few times and the book is very readable for a subject heavy on economics.
“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Joins the Undead.” It could be a best-seller!
Don’t these politicians know any history?
The 1929 depression lasted until Pearl Harbor was bombed.
Nothing the government did had any good effects.
Do we have to wait until we are bombed again to get out of this politically generated recession?
HA HA!!!
I love it!
There’s no way that wouldn’t fly off the shelves!
Exactamundo! Why do these clymers need a book to do the thinking for them? If they had conservative, small government principles to start with, they wouldn’t be looking for cover to justify themselves.
“The government is like a lobster. It will eat anything, it wants to survive, it will compete with anything, and it can be a cannibal. When you look back at the ’30s using the public choice lens, what you discover is the extent to which the Depression wasn’t about a virtuous government and bad businesspeople. Rather, it was about people in office competing with the private sector for power.”
It’s a weak argument. “Government” is that institution that has a monopoly on the initiation of physical force; it is, by definition, NOT a part of the market, and therefore by nature, NON-COMPETITIVE. Government does not “compete” with the private sector: it usurps; it redistributes; it taxes; it punishes; it operates according to the principal of BUREAUCRACY, not the principal of COMPETITION.
I don’t know what a “policy aide” is or what he does, but he is simply ignorant of economics and the vast literature by economists criticizing the New Deal. Most Republicans obviously have not read Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics In One Lesson”, or Murray Rothbard’s “America’s Great Depression,” or anything by Ludwig von Mises.
I have very mixed reviews so far of Amity Shlaes’s book. On the one hand, I suppose any book that retells the story of the failure of import tariffs, wage and price controls, and government job schemes is welcome; on the other hand, it’s unfocused, rambling, and concentrates on personalities rather than on principles of economics. I always have a slight headache after reading a chapter, which I alleviate by reading a few pages from Thomas Sowell’s excellent “Applied Economics” and “Basic Economics.”
Republicans need to understand ECONOMICS, not necessarily ECONOMIC HISTORY; those are two different thnings. After reading Shlaes, Cantor & Co. might conclude “Ah, I see where FDR went wrong: he had bad people in charge of otherwise good policies. I have better people, so my attempt to plan the economy and inflate/spend our way out of a depression would work.”
The jury is still out, but Shlaes appears to me to be a kind of economic “Institutionalist” (like Arthur Burns, who ran the National Burea of Economic Research, which generated many empirical/historical studies of the results of economic policy); that is, someone who doesn’t really accept the idea that economics is a body of LAW — similar, though not identical in nature to laws of physics — but, rather, it comprises mere “social habits” conditioned by the kinds of legal and social institutions a society happens to have. If the New Deal didn’t work, it’s not because it attempted to circumvent (or short-circuit) economic law; it’s because the policies didn’t have the right combination of laws, institutions, and personal leadership.
Shlaes gave a very revealing interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institute. You can find it easily on YouTube.
As I say, I’m still reading her book and the jury is still out, but so far, it doesn’t look hopeful.
What happened?
Now, today, dim-0-crats rule again. Their time in the wilderness was brief, but the lessons of political power and its exercise were updated and honed with renewed vigor.
What is happening today? Will dim-0-crats realize the permanent majority sought and maintain the political royalty as now in power?
FDR did not "fix" the system; he "changed" the system. It is called statism or socialism.
There could be a great inaugural ball scene, where only *some* of the attendees have a reflection in the mirror ...
Of course, to include the Obama Administration, we’d have to have zombies, too.
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