Amity Shlaes: The Forgotten Man

A great review

Mises Daily by C.J. Maloney | Posted on 9/3/2009 12:00:00 AM

So to me, while The Forgotten Man may occupy a place in the reviews as an economic history of the Great Depression — which it is up to a point — more than anything else it is a character study of the one man who above all defined and shaped the New Deal: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And the book reads as a 383-page indictment of him.

Considering what we face today, this book is a must read, for example:

"With the possible exception of Al Capone's Chicago gang, 1930s America saw no greater pile of buccaneering stickup men and rogues than those with whom FDR surrounded himself. As one of the book's central themes, Amity Shlaes condemns them for introducing "regime uncertainty" into the economy, thereby exacerbating the Great Depression. Keep in mind that "regime uncertainty" is but a euphemism for "utter lawlessness."

This "regime uncertainty" was a direct result of the ideological underpinnings of FDR and his Brain Trust.

. . .

Throughout the book, Shlaes demonstrates that FDR considered the law not as something to be respected and adhered to, but as something to be cynically manipulated or ignored at leisure. In his hands, the law became a weapon to be used against his enemies and other, arbitrarily chosen targets. During his first year of rule alone, "10,000 pages of law had been created" (p. 202), and an army of bureaucrats and police had been raised to enforce them.

. . .

H.L. Mencken once observed that the great thing about democracy is that the people get what they deserve — good and hard. Mrs. Shlaes never lets the reader lose sight of the fact that while FDR ushered in the final destruction of the Republic, the American voters, for whatever reason, wanted FDR, loved the New Deal — and still do to this day.


. . .

And, like all socialist systems of government, everything quickly began to harden into an immovable inflexibility. Mrs. Shlaes tells us "the New Dealer's economic failures were working to their own political advantage" (p. 267). The massive increase in the size of the federal government allowed FDR to build himself a formidable political machine, so well-oiled by patronage jobs, bribes, and handouts that "millions of voters [were] under obligation to him" (p. 375), making an election defeat impossible.

As Mrs. Shlaes persuasively argues, the Great Depression did not end because of the New Deal. Quite the opposite, "the New Deal was causing the country to forgo prosperity, if not recovery" (p. 263). FDR and his New Deal became vampires, living high off a Great Depression that his policies were feeding and keeping alive.