Free Republic

How can government get rid of poverty? It’s a question that gets asked not in a society where almost everyone is poor but in one giddy with surging growth and concerned about those who seem left behind—a society whose leaders have “an almost mystical belief in the infinite potentials of American society.” Those are the words of Paul Jacobs, a prominent left-wing journalist and activist a half-century ago, quoted by Amity Shlaes in “Great Society: A New History.” Just as she presented a skeptical alternative to New Deal historians’ accounts of the 1930s in “The Forgotten Man” (2007), Ms. Shlaes...

Amity Shlaes does not believe in playing it safe. In 2007 she issued the original edition of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, which dared to badly dent the established shibboleths regarding America’s Great Depression and how Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal did—or did not—dealt with it. In 2013, she departed the beaten path still more provocatively, resuscitating the reputation of the much-maligned Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge defied all odds and joined The Forgotten Man in achieving best-seller status. Having placed such high-stakes bets and won, she doubled back—and doubled-down—to collaborate on a “graphic” version of The...

My phone rang late on a Friday evening. The number was from an area code with which I wasn’t too familiar. Would I be able to attend a dinner in Manhattan honoring Amity Shlaes on the occasion of the publication of her new Calvin Coolidge biography? Well, yes — yes, I would. Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/02/20/my-dinner-with-calvin/#ixzz2LdOsACmC

Now that we are at Labor Day — meaning the start of the year of presidential campaigning — let us review the five big errors that made the Great Depression. These were spelled out three years ago in a column by our Amity Shlaes. It was issued in the Washington Post under the headline “Five Ways to Wreck a Recovery.” Her lessons are drawn from her seminal history of the catastrophe of the 1930s, “The Forgotten Man.” Her list remains, in our view, one of the most prescient op-ed pieces to herald President Obama’s accession. The tragedy of Mr. Obama’s...

I hardly expected to find the musical version of Amity Shlaes' bestselling critique of New Deal economic policies playing in a 99-seat theater on New York's Upper West Side. But, in a very real sense, I did. Now, I do mean that to be taken literally. Ms. Shlaes published The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression in 2009. The play in question, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's I'd Rather be Right originally debuted somewhat before that -- in November 2, 1937 to be precise. Ms. Shlaes' book and Burton W. Folsom's 2008 study New Deal or Raw...

AMITY SHLAES is a syndicated columnist for Bloomberg and a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a graduate of Yale University and pursued postgraduate studies at the Free University in Berlin. She has served as a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal and as a columnist for the Financial Times. In 2009 she was winner of the Hayek Prize, a book prize from the Thomas Smith Foundation of the Manhattan Institute. In 2003 she was the J.P. Morgan Fellow in Finance and Economics at the American Academy in Berlin....

7-7:30 segment

Before my spirited exchange with my esteemed friend Amity Shlaes about the New Deal reaches the point of diminishing returns, it should be possible to agree on some points that may be applicable to current economic questions. I think we agree that Obamanomics has not succeeded, beyond a tentative stabilization, easily shaken by lack of public confidence in the regime and the absence of any serious deficit-reduction plan. We seem also to agree that unfocused fiscal profligacy on the scale of the $800 billion stimulus bill has not led to significant reductions in unemployment, that more of the same will...

There aren’t any sex scenes or vampires, and it won’t help you lose weight. But House Republicans are tearing through the pages of Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man” like soccer moms before book club night. Shlaes’ 2007 take on the Great Depression questions the success of the New Deal and takes issue with the value of government intervention in a major economic crisis — red meat for a party hungry for empirical evidence that the Democrats’ spending plans won’t end the current recession. “There aren’t many books that take a negative look at the New Deal,” explained Republican policy aide...

For more than half a century, America’s political leaders — Republican and Democrat — have sought to wrap themselves in the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the man credited with replacing fear with hope and ending the Great Depression. But in recent years some writers and economists have been telling a version of this story that is quite different from the one generally taught in school or seen on the History Channel. In this interpretation Roosevelt is a well-meaning but misguided dupe who not only prolonged the Depression but also exacerbated it. ... Amity Shlaes, a syndicated columnist who works...

For five years, classical liberal columnist and Council on Foreign Relations fellow Amity Shlaes delved deeply into the history of the Great Depression. She had been an op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal, a WSJ columnist reuniting Germany, and a columnist for the Financial Times. She wrote two books, on German national identity and on America’s tax policy, critiqued from the right. Both sold well, but neither one foreshadowed the success she’d have with her research on the New Deal. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, published in 2007, has become one of the most...

Amity Shlaes challenges the received wisdom that the Great Depression occurred because capitalism broke, and that it ended because FDR, and government in general, came to the rescue. According to Shlaes, it was the government that made the Great Depression worse.