For those continuing to smoke the government rescued us helpless serfs from a second depression ganja... This claim is what we call a counterfactual — what might have happened if we hadn’t done what we did. The left loves to argue using counterfactuals because — like climate change — they are impossible to refute. No one can say for certain what would have happened in some kind of parallel universe. But getting the story right on this episode of history is a critical issue for American economic policy. Conservatives must not let the left write the narrative of the financial crisis and the massive and unprecedented government interventions designed to combat it — as they are trying to do. We let the left write the history books on the Great Depression, and 70 years later it’s an Aesop Fable. Most Americans, my 12-year-old included — are taught that FDR’s New Deal rescued us from the Great Depression and moved millions of Americans out of misery. Actually, as Amity Shlaes shows in her classic book The Forgotten Man, nearly every government regulatory bureau and spending program only lengthened the Depression and disrupted the normal healing powers of a free economy. ... Just as the massive interventions and dysfunction since 2008 have done...
Posted on: Sun, 01 Jun 2014 21:54:06 +0000
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