Because Nothing Screams Laissez-Faire like a Trade Embargo

In their latest op-ed, picked up National Review Online, Dick Morris and Eileen McGann conclude "In November 2, when the GOP will win both houses of Congress, the House by a considerable margin. The 2010 landslide will likely set the record for the largest transfer of House seats in an off- year election." That's certainly a "pinch me, I'm dreaming" moment for anyone concerned with governmental sanity, and it would a stunning rebuke to the Ruling Class bullying of the last two years. But along the way, Morris and his co-writer drop a serious clanger:

Strangely, the Democrats don’t yet get it. They whistle a happy tune as they march off the cliff. There is no voice of dissent against Obama’s policies, no mumbled animosity, no suppressed discontent. The party is solid as a phalanx behind its leader even as he sends it to political death. It is the Charge of the Light Brigade, and none of them know that “someone has blundered.”

For decades, the liberal alternative glittered attractively on the sidelines. As income inequality increased and Wall Street bonuses excited class animosity, the possibility of an economic-populist response had become more interesting to voters by the time Obama came along. The hyperactive Bush foreign and military policy made the yearning for peace and isolation stronger. And as conservatives increased our national wealth, the glaring omission of the health-care system loomed larger. Finally, when the depression hit, voters called in the liberals from stage left and asked them to take a shot at turning the country around.

And did they ever! They kept their promises and then some. They tripled the deficit and sent the debt soaring. From the moment George Washington took the oath of office until Obama did, America had borrowed $9 trillion. Under Obama, it has borrowed $3.2 trillion more, in less than two years. Our health-care system was deformed, manufacturing was terrified by the prospect of cap-and-tax, GM was absorbed by the government and conquered by the unions, and federalism was buried in an avalanche of subsidies that turned state governments into branch offices of Washington.

Americans have learned their lesson, just as they learned from Hoover the evils of Republican laissez-faire economics. His legacy cast a shadow over politics until Eisenhower vanquished it with his personal popularity in 1952. But it was not until Nixon and Reagan that anti-Hooverism stopped structuring national elections.

In George McGovern, we all saw the incompetence of liberalism, its disorganization, its extremism, and its ultimate impotence. The best testament to his failure as a candidate is his own discovery of the virtues of private-sector capitalism in his old age. This gentleman — who was never anything less than that — clearly paved the way for Ronald Reagan and the conservative ascendancy.

This is likely not the legacy Obama had in mind when, with his massive ego, limited competence, and paltry experience, he took over the White House. Americans, in a fit of national delusion, made what they now realize was one of their biggest mistakes.

Whatever the imagined "evils of Republican laissez-faire economics," Americans didn't learn them from Hoover, they learned them from his handling of the Depression was re-imagined and retold to create the legend of FDR's handling of the Depression, a Sorelian myth if there ever was one. In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes explored just how aggressively Hoover and the GOP attempted to rejigger the economy after the Crash of 1929, often with disastrous results. Or as Ilya Somin wrote at the start of 2009 at the Volokh Conspiracy:









While one can admire National Review for presenting a wide-range of viewpoints on their Website, I'm really surprised that an editor didn't catch Morris and McGann's howler and insert a quick red-line, or ask for a rewrite of a sentence that's pure liberal conventional wisdom.