Free Republic

Irely on experts. Everyone should. Sick? Visit the doctor. Tooth trouble? The dentist. Car trouble? The mechanic. Climbing Mount Everest? Hire a guide. Want to come closer to God? A church near you meets at 10:30 or 11 this Sunday. Experts are indispensable aides to lives well-lived. Trust Us, a new documentary from the Pacific Legal Foundation, discusses experts in a wholly different role. These experts do not offer advice. They issue commands. The documentary considers the role experts assumed in the twentieth century: figuring out what you should do and how you should do it. You aren’t just to...

—Sargent Shriver, brother in law of JFK and the “architect” of the “War on Poverty,” to socialist Michael Harrington (who wanted much, much more of the American taxpayers’ dollars), 1964. Amity Shlaes’ newest book, Great Society: A New History is a sequel to her two studies of 1930s and 1920s, 2007’s The Forgotten Man, and 2013’s Coolidge. The eponymous Forgotten Man was the taxpayer, the man footing the bill to fund FDR’s New Deal. As a UCLA press release explained in 2004, “FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.” Even socialist Roosevelt worshiper Paul Krugman has been...

Clearly we have to reach beyond academia if we want to reclaim our history. "Calvin Coolidge had four percent growth which candidates today only talk about as a goal," Amity Shlaes, the former Wall Street Journal reporter turned Coolidge biographer, said of the much-maligned former president. Shlaes, who has also written critically of FDR, was the luncheon speaker at the annual national meeting of the Philadelphia Society, a group of conservative intellectuals, formed in the wake of the Goldwater defeat of 1964. Seventy-three percent was the top tax rate in 1923, Shlaes noted at the Philadelphia Society’s meeting in Charlotte,...

Author and columnist Amity Shlaes responds to viewers' questions and comments on such topics as Depression era presidents and current fiscal policies. She’s the author of four non-fiction books, including The Forgotten Man and Coolidge.

Another decade, another Gatsby. The actors change but the message put forward in the adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 book stays the same. The 1920s were as ephemeral as a Champagne bubble. A fake stock market, an illicit liquor business and other falsehoods made Jay Gatsby and others like him into correspondingly false millionaires. The pleasure of the rich, “careless people,” as a character calls them, came at a cost to the rest, especially the middle class, the small people, mere ants in black tie to be trampled by giants like Gatsby at their parties. The inaccuracy here starts...

Derided by New Dealers, Coolidge gets long-overdue respect in Shlaes’s biography. For years, most Americans’ vision of history has been shaped by the New Deal historians. Writing soon after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and others celebrated his accomplishments and denigrated his opponents. They were gifted writers, and many of their books were bestsellers. They have persuaded many Americans — Barack Obama definitely included — that progress means an ever-bigger government. In their view, the prosperous 1920s were a binge of mindless frivolity. The Depression of the 1930s was the inevitable hangover, for which FDR administered the cure.That’s one...

Change isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. That’s what most of us have come to realize in recent years, whether the change proposed came from Pres. Barack Obama or the Tea Party movement. Still, most haven’t quite reached the point where we oppose change and fight for stability. Maybe we ought to: Maybe sometimes it is the time for no change. That, at least, was the position of Warren Harding. Warren who? On the presidential roster, Harding is POTUS 43. No, that doesn’t mean he’s replaced George W. Bush: Harding’s “43” is his aggregate rank among presidents. Since...

Before my spirited exchange with my esteemed friend Amity Shlaes about the New Deal reaches the point of diminishing returns, it should be possible to agree on some points that may be applicable to current economic questions. I think we agree that Obamanomics has not succeeded, beyond a tentative stabilization, easily shaken by lack of public confidence in the regime and the absence of any serious deficit-reduction plan. We seem also to agree that unfocused fiscal profligacy on the scale of the $800 billion stimulus bill has not led to significant reductions in unemployment, that more of the same will...

Bloomberg: Title and link allowed only http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-27/palin-mama-grizzly-shows-limits-of-woman-wisdom-amity-shlaes.html

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Then the question which remains is, What ought Some-of-us to do for Others-of-us?" The Case of the Forgotten Man Farther Considered There is a beautiful notion afloat in our literature and in the minds of our people that men are born to certain "natural rights." If that were true, there would be something on earth which was got for nothing, and this world would not be the place it is at all. The fact is that there is no right whatever inherited by man which has not an equivalent and corresponding duty by the side of it, as the...

For five years, classical liberal columnist and Council on Foreign Relations fellow Amity Shlaes delved deeply into the history of the Great Depression. She had been an op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal, a WSJ columnist reuniting Germany, and a columnist for the Financial Times. She wrote two books, on German national identity and on America’s tax policy, critiqued from the right. Both sold well, but neither one foreshadowed the success she’d have with her research on the New Deal. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, published in 2007, has become one of the most...

FDR Was a Great Leader, But His Economic Plan Isn't One to Follow By Amity Shlaes Sunday, February 1, 2009 One evening in the 1930s, a 13-year-old named William Troeller hanged himself from the transom of his bedroom in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. William's father was laid up in Kings County Hospital awaiting surgery for an injury he'd suffered on the job at Brooklyn Edison. A federal jobs program was paying William's older brother Harold for temporary work. But the amount wasn't nearly enough to make ends meet. Gas and electricity to the family's apartment had been shut off for half a...

June 20, 2008, 0:00 p.m. What’s the Frequency?New Deal narcissism and what FDR wrought. An NRO Q&A The New Deal celebrates its 75th anniversary this week. National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez checked in with New York Times bestselling author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, Amity Shlaes, to mark the occasion. Kathryn Jean Lopez: How are you celebrating the New Deal’s 75th? Amity Shlaes: I’m participating in the Roosevelt Reading Festival at Hyde Park Saturday! One of the people I will see there is Nick Taylor, author of his own book, American Made,...

Alter's readers would never suspect that [FDR] scores as badly if not worse on the typical kinds of charges hurled against George W. Bush and his administration: militarism, ideological cabals, secrecy, lies and lying-us-into-war, unscrupulous punishment of political enemies, disrespect for the Constitution and our political traditions, run-amok Wilsonianism, special favors for Big Business, and, most of all, incompetence. As historian William Leuchtenburg documented in his essay "The New Deal as Moral Analogue to War," Roosevelt's presidency was drenched in martial metaphors and militaristic appeals to loyalty and unity long before World War II. The New Deal's Public Works Administration...

"Americans just now need what Amity Shlaes has brilliantly supplied, a fresh appraisal of what the New Deal did and did not accomplish...." -George F. Will, Columnist

Review: The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes By Lil Tuttle What happens if government intervenes in a nation’s economic crisis and makes it worse? Amity Shlaes tells such a story in her book, The Forgotten Man: a New History of the Great Depression (HarperCollins). School children are generally taught this standard history lesson about the Great Depression: The 1920s was a period of false growth, high living and low morals brought to a halt by the 1929 stock market crash. The crash led to crippling inflation and the nation’s economic collapse. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took control and ushered...

I am already getting angry after reading the first 14 pages. I had I started this book before election day I might have stayed home. One question: The stockmarket fell on October 28th, 1929, from 299 to 261, then from 261 to 230 on October 29th, 1929. Why was this considered a crash? "As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to...

In his 1932 campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt had talked about helping someone he called “the forgotten man.” He was thinking of the poorest man, or as he put it—invoking the time of the pharaohs—“the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” The phrase came from an essay (and later a book) written decades before, called The Forgotten Man. Written by a famous Yale professor named William Graham Sumner, this essay defined “the forgotten man” differently. Sumner employed an algebra to explain what he meant: A and B want to help X, he wrote. This is the charitable impulse. The...

The late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was a true liberal--a man who welcomed debate. Just before he died this winter, he wrote, quoting someone else, that history is an argument without end. That, Schlesinger added, "is why we love it so." Yet concerning Schlesinger's own period of study, the 1930s, there has been curiously little argument. The American consensus is Schlesinger's consensus: that FDR saved democracy from fascism by co-opting the left and far right with his alphabet programs. Certainly, an observer might criticize various aspects of the period, but scrutiny of the New Deal edifice in its entirety is something...