Bonus Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page xiii of Amity Shlaes’s Introduction to her 2023 anthology, New Deal Rebels:

[T]he reasons for the failure of the New Deal are clear. The Depression endured because the means by which America’s leaders, President Herbert Hoover and then, especially, President Roosevelt, chose to cure it: top-down federal intervention. Roosevelt told Americans “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Yet it was the New Deal that fostered fear, prolonging the trouble. The very arbitrariness of the New Dealers’ moves caused markets and employers to freeze.

DBx: Yes. For solid empirical evidence of the the truth of Amity’s claim, see Robert Higgs’s brilliant 2006 book, Depression, War, and Cold War.