The Laissez Faire That Never Was

From www.cafehayek.com:

Laissez Faire – Not!
Posted: 23 Aug 2009 05:10 AM PDT
Some myths never die. I sent this letter yesterday to the New York Times; it addresses only one of the many flaws in David Leonhardt’s article:
Suggesting that President Herbert Hoover followed laissez-faire policies, David Leonhart writes that "we can’t rerun the past year with a Hooverite economic strategy" to see what its outcome would have been ("Theory and Morality in the New Economy <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/books/review/Leonhardt-t.html?scp=1&sq=Hooverite&st=cse> ," August 19).
No need to do so, for the past year was run "with a Hooverite economic strategy." From Pres. Hoover’s 52 percent increase in government spending to his running the third-largest budget deficit then in U.S. history – and from his creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to his signing of the Federal Home Loan Bank Act – Hoover’s hyperactive intervention nearly 80 years ago was not very different from Bush’s and Obama’s hyperactive interventions today. Hoover himself, campaigning for re-election in October 1932 <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=23269&st=&st1> , bragged of rejecting the advice of "reactionary economists [who] urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until it had found its own bottom."
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux