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Just letting things happen is not a formula for success.

I suggest to you that "just letting things happen"was for the most part precisely the formula for success until the depression/WWII generation tossed it all away for free handouts.

Without a doubt America prior to that generation had lots of room for improvement. Likewise, many improvements have occurred despite their gi'me, gi'me, gi'me demands that were forced upon the vitality of the nation. But the resulting costs, hopelessness, and mass dependencies that came out of their political actions have now been institutionalized into a new nationwide underclass.

The regressive proposals of the so-called "progressives" and the anti-social policies of the misnamed "liberals" have only compounded the problems. Our current caretaker "conservative" government, only able to hold on through the last election due to a war and a threat of terrorism, has offered nothing new, except more of the same, as it tries to balance the concerns of opposing interests.

In a prior reply on this thread you mentioned "trasnportation" and "eminent domain." The full costs of which you did not go into. Besides the small taxing and actual property thefts that have occurred in their name, their is the much larger costs of urban sprawl, with its subsequent demands for wider roads, land use planning, and further theft of property use rights (not to include the massive additional costs to meet environmental concerns). Try reversing this situation, with its subsequent handouts, and one will quickly see just how powerful the construction industry and its unions have become.

In another reply, you speak of "equal opportunity." You say "we should not penalize people for things that are not their fault.." But that is exactly what you do when you imply that freedom penalizes them. Freedom penalizes nobody. But implying that it does, allows for an easy way to ignore the fact that a lack of freedom is exactly what is actually penalizing them. Envisioning people as mere wage slaves, pigeon holes them as being either lazy incapable of taking care of themselves. Instead of offering them freedom (spontinaety in business), the call goes out for more spending of other people's money to care for them while training them to be 8 hour a day, 40 hour a week wage slaves. It may make the promoters of such expenditures feel superior as they look down upon these poor folks, but it does not take care of their real needs.

I'm not sure how true it is that "just letting things happen" was the formula for success before World War Two you claim for it. You have just given me incentive to read my copy of Heilbroner and Singer "The Economic Transformation of America"! While I agree that markets can be rational, there is such a thing as market failures. Mankiw mentions a few in his textbook. Charles Kindleberger in his book "Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises" mentions even more. The question, of course, is what to do when things go badly wrong. While I defend the New Deal aims, I am open to consider there may be better ways to achieve them during such crises. But given the level of suffering that occurred then, especially in the wake of the Dust Bowl, and given that recovery was nowhere in sight, I believe the government needed to try some things we might not have otherwise contemplated. Asking starving people to wait for the market to correct itself is cruel, especially when so many were out of work. Getting America working again was a good idea, even if it did not, by itself, get us out of the Depression.

I believe there are genuine emergencies where people will die if government doesn't intervene. And there are long term crises where people will slowly fall behind without a little assistance. I think the challenge is to do so in such a way as to not undermine incentives to work and improve, and to do so in ways that do not weigh down economic growth. But I think we can do this now. Just as for the military, I think we can go smaller and smarter, and still be effective.

BTW, I think urban sprawl is precisely what happened from lack of planning. It is a case of the unintentional consequences of intentional actions (e.g., our embrace of the personal motor vehicle with internal combustion engines has had all sorts of unintended, and even unwelcome consequences, as well as the good and intended ones). This is not something government created, but is a feature of human actions in general.

I agree however that there have been lots of cases of aggressive land grabbing that followed some misconceived imperative to develop more roads. That is a problem for which short sighted municipal governments should rightly be blamed.