Ezra Klein thinks that it is "cheap irony" that the American Enterprise Institute is following a talk on the Great Depression and the "forgotten man" with a wine-and-cheese reception:
Ezra Klein: Department of Cheap Irony: I'm not really sure what's being discussed at this AEI forum, but it's sort of awesome to host an event on "The Forgotten Man: A New Look at the Great Depression" and follow it up with a wine and cheese reception...
He doesn't know the half of it. It's Amity Shlaes, who you remember--who will be remembered until the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush fades from the memory of humanity--for this commentary on Hurricane Katrina:
The Thought of George W. Bush Is a Spiritual Atom Bomb of Infinite Power!: Amity Shlaes: It is early to be getting partisan about New Orleans. We are still too close to the awfulness of the hurricane.... Still, Iraq has not caused the US to botch Katrina -- either the preparation or response. On the contrary, the fact that the country and President Bush personally were already mobilised for disaster has saved lives.... September 11 changed Mr Bush and the country.... Mr Bush grew into a new role of leader in emergencies.... In addition to its old Federal Emergency Management Agency, [the government] created the Office of Homeland Security to co-ordinate local, state and federal responses. The level of preparedness for a giant storm may not have been obvious outside the country. But the US was prepared for Katrina. All the old and new federal offices worked together and confronted the storm early...
She's coming to AEI to talk about her forthcoming book about the Great Depression--a book blurbed not by an economist or a historian, but by party-line-toeing right-wing hyena-novelist Mark Helprin:
http://www.cfr.org/content/bios/Shlaes%20NarBio%20January%202006.pdf: Novelist Mark Helprin has said of The Forgotten Man, “Were John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman to spend a century or two reconciling their positions so as to arrive at a clear view of the Great Depression, this would be it.” Her last book, The Greedy Hand: Why Taxes Drive Americans Crazy (Random House/Harvest paperback), was a national bestseller. Miss Shlaes also recently coauthored, with the late Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal, the contribution on tax philosophy in Intellect into Influence, a Manhattan Institute retrospective volume...
What does the book say?:
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression: Challenging conventional history, Amity Shlaes offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression.... Hoover and Roosevelt failed to understand... heaped massive burdens on the country.... From 1929 to 1940, federal intervention helped to make the Depression great by forgetting the men and women who sought to help themselves. In this illuminating work of history, Shlaes follows the struggles of those now forgotten people, from a family of butchers in Brooklyn who dealt a stunning blow to the New Deal, to Bill W., who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, and Father Divine, a black cult leader. She takes a fresh look at the great scapegoats of the period, from Andrew Mellon to Sam Insull of Chicago.... Authoritative, original, and utterly engrossing...
Original? Certainly. Engrossing? Perhaps. Authoritative? I've always liked Samuel Insull--an excellent engineer, a good manager, and a risk-loving speculator who was in the end taken down by the Morgans. The Supreme Court did a good deed by striking down Roosevelt's NIRA in Schechter Poultry, but the oral tradition at Cravath is said to be that the orthodox "family of butchers in Brooklyn" were chosen as plaintiffs by Frederick H. Wood as part of his long-run anti-New Deal litigation strategy, in this case to swing the vote of Louis Brandeis. But Andrew Mellon?
Here's Herbert Hoover's couldn't-be-harsher view of:
the “leave it alone liquidationists” headed by [my] Secretary of the Treasury Mellon, who felt that government must keep its hands off and let the slump liquidate itself. Mr. Mellon had only one formula: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” He insisted that, when the people get an inflation brainstorm, the only way to get it out of their blood is to let it collapse. He held that even a panic was not altogether a bad thing. He said: “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people”...
Milton Friedman likes--alas! liked--to quote R.G. Hawtrey of the British Treasury, who said that Mellon and the others who thought in 1930-1933 that the big danger was excessive inflation were "crying 'Fire! Fire!' in Noah's Flood." A nationwide banking panic is altogether a bad thing. In this dismissal of Mellon's economic policy Friedman was in complete agreement with John Maynard Keynes:
Keynes: It seems an extraordinary imbecility that this wonderful outburst of productive energy [over 1924-1929] should be the prelude to impoverishment and depression [today, in 1932]. Some austere and puritanical souls [like Mellon] regard it both as an inevitable and a desirable nemesis on so much overexpansion, as they call it; a nemesis on man's speculative spirit. It would, they feel, be a victory for the mammon of unrighteousness if so much prosperity was not subsequently balanced by universal bankruptcy. We need, they say, what they politely call a 'prolonged liquidation' to put us right. The liquidation, they tell us, is not yet complete. But in time it will be. And when sufficient time has elapsed for the completion of the liquidation, all will be well with us again...
