My Freeman colleague Sheldon Richman writes in his Friday column about Herbert Hoover. If you haven’t already heard, the notion that Hoover was a die-hard advocate of laissez-faire capitalism is completely false. He was by training an engineer and he thought that politicians could engineer the economy just as engineers can build and control machines and structures. That isn’t the case at all and Americans have been paying a heavy price since 1929 for Hoover’s misplaced faith in politicians and their coercive economic “remedies.”
The article contains a priceless quotation from Richard Cobden on the importance of keeping the state out of commerce and trade.
