Quotation of the Day…

Tweet

… is from page 111 of Robert Higgs’s October 2006 paper “What Got Us Into and Out of the Great Depression?” as this paper is reprinted in Higgs’s 2007 book, Neither Liberty Nor Safety (links added):

Nearly all of the counterproductive policies adopted from 1933 to 1938 reflected the triumph of Progressive ideology and political self-serving over the application of economic rationality to improve economic conditions on a wide scale – which is to say that these policies, regardless of their creators’ beliefs or assurances, were not actually in the public interest. It was a great misfortune for the American people that the New Dealers “turned away from the market toward a managed economy and democratic socialism” (Temin 1989, 97) and that they embraced above all “the conviction that government must play an active role in the economy” (Brinkley 1995, 10). In practice, this conviction was equivalent to the belief that a bull elephant must play an active role in the China shop.