Obama, FDR, and the Great Depression

Image by State Library of New South Wales collection via Flickr

There are a number of reasons why I am against the unprecedented expansion of the federal government and the massive debt we are accumulating.  First and foremost, there is so much that the government has no business being involved in.  As if I needed another reason, here it is.

The Institute of Economic Affairs has released a pamphlet stating that Barack Obama is repeating the same mistakes that FDR made in handling the Great Depression.  The study has been endorsed by economist James Buchanan who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1986.  The paper was written by economists Charles Rowley of George Mason University and Nathanael Smith of the Locke Institute.

The authors argue that FDR's interventionist policies and tax increases delayed the recovery by several years.  They see "troubling similarities" between FDR's policies and Obama's.  They believe that the large deficit spending and government involvement will hamper long term economic growth and may delay full economic recovery by several years. Furthermore, they fear that the US could face the same fate as Argentina which slid from First to a Third World status.

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