Wow! Can’t believe this is making it into mainstream publications!
It’s a recurring fantasy for left wing academics fascinated by central planning that in cyclical downturns government should act decisively on a scale equivalent to war. Nobel Prize recipient Paul Krugman exemplifies this intellectual longing to steer our lives.
Krugman effortlessly slides into a war footing espousing intervention comparable to America’s crusade against Hitler, who, take note, centrally planned an economy himself:
“World War II is the great natural experiment in the effects of large increases in government spending, and as such has always served as an important positive example for those of us who favor an activist approach to a depressed economy.”
After WWII until its glaring failures manifest in the Seventies, Keynesianism inundated economic thought. Paul Samuelson’s textbooks became mainstays across the academy. Samuelson championed mathematical analysis, which transformed macroeconomics into a pseudo science spawning waves of budding planners infatuated with statistics.
From this basis the myth prevails that WWII finally overcame the Great Depression. History has revised Hoover, easily the most meddlesome peacetime president before FDR, into a laissez-faire reactionary. The New Deal – a disastrous example of everything not to do during downturns became beneficial, only it supposedly wasn’t aggressive enough.
(Read more from forbes.com)