I am gonna write this over and over and over and over.

Republicans are not opposed to government. They are not opposed to big government. They are not opposed to intrusive government.

They say they are, but this is a lie. Their opposition to New Deal policies has nothing to do with the size of the government. It has to do with the recipients of funds from the Treasury.

It is absolutely clear that the Republican party believes the role of government is to transfer funds from wage earners and consumers to capital holders, and to the top executives at oligopolies protected, by the government, from competition.

consider how long the Holocaust deniers have been out there ... so what is described above is of a piece with that. On the bright side, there is an historical consensus that the Holocaust did happen and that FDR/WW II ended the Depression. Just like there's a consensus--in spite of the naysayers--tht cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and that burning fossil fuels causes global warming.

Indeed, sjw, there is no danger at all that an unqualified jackass like Shlaes will have any impact at all on the real scholarly consensus about the New Deal with her blatantly mendacious writings.

Is it too early to bring out the Amityville Horror jokes?

"there's a whole intellectual industry,.. devoted to propagating the idea that F.D.R. actually made the Depression worse."

What, you got a problem with free enterprise?

Two simplified Shlaes-debunking talking points for the water cooler:

(1) In 1937, FDR tried to cut spending and that was what prolonged the recession. If he had continued the New Deal at a full clip, it would have worked, even without the WW2.

(2) The New Deal did not stifle private investment – when there were abandoned factories, why would private investor would build new ones?

See Eric Rauchway's great series of posts on Shlaes and other "New Deal denialists", at Edge of the American West.

Roosevelt had one great advantage over Obama: the Great Depression began in 1929, the New Deal began in 1933, after four years of Republican economics. The correct experiment is to look at the first four years, and the second four years: which set of policies worked best?

Of course the economic model which spurred government spending wasn't developed before the depression began, and Roosevelt didn't fully invest in it. Only the massive spending of WWII ended the depression, a fact that most everyone leaves out of the discussion. Roosevelt's policies were not enough, not until '40-'41 anyway.

But House Republicans are tearing through the pages of Amity Shlaes' "The Forgotten Man" like soccer moms before book club night.

Gaah!!

Worst-constructed simile ever.

Politico sucks.

In 1972, British Columbians elected a social-democratic party (the NDP) to power after 21 years of God-bound, rightwing parochialism (Social Credit Party). The province's business community promptly threw a massive snit and capital investment basically stopped. The economy suffered, outrages were manufactured and the NDP was thrown out only three years later, the Social Crediters returning with a vengeance.

If anyone says investment will dry up as a result of the stimulus package, they are not describing a consequence, they are making a threat.

Let's not forgot this FACT: BY THE TIME 1936 ROLLED AROUND THE REPIGLICANS HAD EXACTLY 16, COUNT THAT AGAIN, 16 SENATORS LEFT. Yep, that's how effective and popular their fucking delusions were. The good news is that we are exactly on that road again .. maybe this time they will simply become extinct.

For these GOP officials, one starts with the answer -- FDR bad, spending bad, government bad, Hoover good -- and works backwards, seeking out those who'll bolster their answers before the questions are even asked.

Yes. And the sun rises in the east. And the Cubs won't win the World Series this year. Any other obvious observations you want to make?

This is, after all, the same group of intellectual giants that gave us Intelligent Design, Supply-Side Economics, and the Tobacco Institute of Science.

It's the tribal gene that Republicans were born with. Their basic tenet of life is "my tribe good, all others bad". When you start with "I right, you wrong" as your postulate, everything else that follows tries to justify that.

The process of "pick your conclusion and look for evidence to support it" is creationist logic, and it is the essential purpose of right-wing "think" tanks. They didn't like the answers academia produced, so they declared them "biased" and created their own twisted version of it, something with all the trappings of it ("scholar in residence," etc.) where you can take any line of reasoning, no matter how ludicrous, and as long as it reaches the "right" conclusions, your job is secure.

I think the reason they so doggedly pursued disastrous policies in the previous eight years is that they've raised an entire generation who actually believe that this hothouse process is real research, and that their ideas had been "tested" against reality.

Only the massive spending of WWII ended the depression, a fact that most everyone leaves out of the discussion.

Really? When I was in school, the standard short version of the history of the '30s was "the New Deal alleviated a lot of the suffering, but the Depression didn't really end until WWII."

(It was high school history, so we didn't get into the nuance we do now about whether the good the New Deal did for unemployment and other effects were part of "ending the Great Depression" vs. "alleviating suffering.")

Republicans need to "man up" and forget FDR, then learn to skillfully govern large urban populations. Otherwise, they will have nothing to contribute to the conversation about the direction of the nation.

The only well thought out opposition to Obama's plans comes from Paul Krugman, compared to which the Republicans' intellectual tools are no better than using stone knives and bear skins to fix supersonic jets, computers, and the common cold.

tom,

"Only the massive spending of WWII ended the depression, a fact that most everyone leaves out of the discussion."

It is left out of the discussion because it is NOT a fact.

By 1936, long before war or even rumors of war, the GDP had risen to +13% and the Unemployment Rate had fallen to 9%, from NEGATIVE 13% GDP and a 25% Unemployment Rate in 1932 (note that if we still calculated unemployment as we did then, our current Unemployment Rate is more than 16%).

The New Deal worked like a charm.

The New Deal worked like a charm.

Yep. The subsequent 1937-8 recession was caused by FDR cutting govt spending in response to whining from the Dixiecrats. As often is the case, it was the conservatives from the most ignorant part of the country that derailed the recovery.

Fortunately today the Democrats today have a party registration advantage that rivals what they had in the late 1930s, yet without having to rely on the traitorist dixiecrats. The blue dogs are a pain, but they don't hold a candle to the segregationists in terms of pure ignorance and stupidity.

"Shlaes' 2007 take on the Great Depression questions the success of the New Deal and takes issue with the value of government intervention in a major economic crisis"

If my history is correct, the United States, and the world as a whole, would suffer through economic depressions every 20 years or so.

It's been over 60 years since the last one.

Why is that?

And if the New Deal was such a failure, and Americans were just as bad off in 1936 as they were in 1932, why did FDR win re-election?

Was is the liberal media telling Americans that things weren't that bad?

ACORN, perhaps?

Maybe mass hypnosis?

Shlaes' 2007 take on the Great Depression is no different than Malkin's rewrite of the history of Japanese internment or Goldberg's interpretation of fascism. All of them followed the model of their ideological grandfather, the Bell Curve. All these books were funded by far right crazies who inherited vast wealth, were designed to emulate scientific works in form but not in content, and to be used to confuse the issue with the mainstream low IQ journalist and help the wingnut base justify their repugnant racist views.