The New Deal as Carefully Planned Spending: Who Knew?

The New York Times wants to take us back to the future: a 1930s future, that is. Today, the Times has an op-ed column praising the meticulous spending of the New Deal that “lubricated the economy.” We see goodies like:

Under the leadership of Harry Hopkins, the W.P.A. took a mandate to do small projects and literally remade America. The W.P.A.’s workers, who numbered around 3.5 million at their peak, gave the country a new infrastructure that kept pace with emerging commerce and technology. At the same time their paychecks lubricated the economy.

The idea that government does anything in tandem with “emerging technologies” except do destructive things is so laughable that only the editorial page of the Times would take it seriously. As James Couch and William Shughart noted in their book, The Political Economy of the New Deal, the Roosevelt administration targeted its “public works” spending for political, not economic purposes.

It seems that the media today is hellbent on re-writing the 1930s, and the political classes are clamoring for more and more spending of dollars that we don’t have to follow down rabbit trails. We are seeing the consequences of the Keynesian fallacies, and the destruction that falls in their wake. The incoming president is as clueless and destructive as the outgoing one, but at least no one is claiming that George W. Bush is the Messiah.

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6:25 am on December 9, 2008