… is from page 149 of Amity Shlaes’s important 2007 book about the Great Depression and the New Deal, The Forgotten Man (original ellipses):
“When it was all over,” [New Deal insider Rex] Tugwell would later write, “I once made a list of New Deal ventures begun during Hoover’s years as secretary of commerce and then as president…. The New Deal owed much to what he had begun.”
Steve Horwitz’s paper from last year on this matter supplies further evidence that Herbert Hoover was what Adam Smith criticized as “a man of system” – not in the least a proponent of laissez faire.
