Hillsdale College history professor Burt Folsom (disclosure: a good friend of mine) has written several splendid revisionist books during his career and the most recent is his examination of the New Deal. David Gordon of the on Mises Institute gives the book a favorable review here.
Gordon does criticize Folsom for not doing more to lay the genesis of the Depression at the foot of inflationary federal policy and explicate the Austrian business cycle theory. Okay, but you can’t put everything in a book.
Where I think the book is truly outstanding is the way it digs into the details of the New Deal — how it affected ordinary people. Statistics on federal spending should not obscure the specifics of the programs that FDR fostered and Folsom shows how damaging those programs often were for people struggling to run their businesses and farms.
Also, Folsom’s book shows the great extent to which scarce resources were diverted from the productive sector and sucked into the vast political maw of Washington, DC. Money that would have otherwise gone into investment was taxed away so FDR could employ legions of bureaucrats whose jobs often entailed interfering with business and agriculture. A double whammy.
What with all the blather about our supposed need for a new New Deal, the intellectual warfare over the truth about FDR’s policies takes on added significance.
