Book Review: The Forgotten Man

A Review of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes
reviewed by George Leef

“The Depression hit the country because capitalism has a tendency to sometimes collapse, but luckily Roosevelt was elected and his brilliant New Deal policies got the economy moving again.”

That view is not just mistaken – it’s a key component of the statist mythology in America…

With her new book, The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes has dealt a shattering blow to that mythology. Her lucid and highly readable book leaves the reader with the understanding that capitalism got a bum rap in the 1930s and that the New Deal, far from being brilliant, was a nightmare…

Three years of interventionist policies under Hoover – Shlaes makes it clear that Hoover was anything but the dogmatic laissez-faire advocate he is usually said to have been – and five more under Roosevelt had turned America into a country where a nearly omnipotent government was everywhere, controlled by people who admired Stalin and Mussolini as models of forward-looking leaders…

As an aside, one can’t help wondering what the United States would be like today if, instead of turning to coercive, statist “remedies” for the Depression, Americans had drawn the correct conclusions and turned away from the bad policies they already had, especially high tariffs and central banking. America would be a much freer and more prosperous country today but for the intellectual blunders of the 1930s…

Roosevelt and his subordinates tinkered and tampered constantly with the liberty and property of Americans. The federal budget grew and grew and regulations on business mushroomed, but the economy remained in the doldrums. It never dawned on the New Dealers that coercion is counterproductive…

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A must read for those who think FDR "saved capitalism" and ended the Great Depression.