FDR'S Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged The Great Depression
By Jim Powell
ISBN1-4000-5477-X

FDR was president for twelve years.  His political party enjoyed large majorities in Congress during his presidency.  He did nearly everything he wished to do with his New Deal.  And yet, the deep recession he inherited grew into a depression, and under his watch the depression became Great, the worst in our history.  Why, then, is the New Deal most times remembered fondly, as if it were a success? 

In FDR's Folly, Jim Powell takes a painstakingly in depth look into this question, replete with economic history and statistical evidence that begs the common sense question: If the New Deal worked, why did the economy go from bad to worse to greatly depressed?

Consider that from 1934 to 1940 the average unemployment rate was 17 percent, the lowest one year average during the 1930s being 14 percent.  How did this come to be? Powell cites many more of the puzzling agendas of the New Deal.  He illustrates why the practical effects of elitist attempts to remake and centrally-plan the world in their image and the outright rejection of free market economics and common sense invariably lead to economic and social ruin.

Powell also dispels long-cherished fables of our generic history of the Great Depression, including the myth that Hoover was a laissez-faire non-interventionalist.

Folly provides the reader with a plethora of historical evidence to disprove and repudiate the same old worn out premises and assumptions concerning the overreaching of government into the market place.  Many of the central planning arguments found and disproved in Folly read like this morning's blogs.  The premises of anti-freedom biases do not change over time, so we need arm ourselves with many good books like FDR's Folly.