Outstanding Panel Discussion of the New Deal

by Liberty and Power

This link will lead you to a post by Bryan Caplan at EconLog. He in turns links to a video of an outstanding panel discussion on the New Deal that includes distinguished historian David Kennedy, along with Canadians Eric Lascelles and Joe Martin and economists Russ Roberts and Lee Ohanian. The discussion is well worth 35 minutes of your time. Note how Kennedy at the outset concedes that the New Deal failed to bring any recovery and then tries to make the peculiar claim that its goal was not recovery at all but reform. I link to Bryan's post rather than directly to the video because Bryan's comments are also worth your attention.

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Jeffrey Rogers Hummel - 12/17/2008

Yes, but this is not exactly what Kennedy was saying. He explicitly admitted that FDR was using the depression in order to push through radical reforms that otherwise would have been politically impossible. In fact, Kennedy cited a passage from the second inaugural in which FDR worried about the depression ending too quickly.

David T. Beito - 12/16/2008

This doesn't surprise me. I've found very, very few well-informed leftists who argue that the New Deal succeeded. Typically, they use Kennedy's argument and/or say it would have been even worse had we pursued laissez faire.