Gordon Hirabayashi died on January 2, at age 93.

The Washington Post obituary notes that the  federal government put him in a prison during the 1940s. President Franklin Roosevelt issued many decrees, but the one that would lead to Hirabayashi’s imprisonment, Executive Order 9066, said that thousands of Americans residing on the West Coast had to leave their jobs and homes and promptly report to certain prison camps (“relocation centers”).  The feds said actual proof of wrongdoing was unnecessary.

Hirabayashi refused to go along with the program, so he was prosecuted for disobeying the president and jailed. The courts rejected his argument that FDR had exceeded the powers of his office.  In an interview in 1985, Hirabayashi looked back on his ordeal and said, “My citizenship didn’t protect me one bit.  Our Constitution was reduced to a scrap of paper.”

Even though there are written safeguards concerning due process, habeas corpus, and jury trial, presidents will sometimes assert the power to override all that. FDR did it. George W. Bush did it. And Barack Obama wants to reserve the option to do it.

On January 17, Cato will be hosting a book forum about FDR’s war policies and civil liberties.

For related Cato scholarship, go here and here.

FDR and Executive Order 9066 is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I’ve commented many times about the misguided big-government policies of both Hoover and FDR, so I can say with considerable admiration that this new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity packs an amazing amount of solid info into about five minutes.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation in the video, at least to everyone other than economic historians, is that America suffered a harsh depression after World War I, with GDP falling by a staggering 24 percent.

But we don’t read much about that downturn in the history books, in large part because it ended so quickly.

The key question, though, is why did that depression end quickly while the Great Depression dragged on for a decade?

One big reason for the different results is that markets were largely left unmolested in the 1920s. This meant resources could be quickly redeployed, minimizing the downturn.

But this doesn’t mean the crowd in Washington was completely passive. They did do something to help the economy recover. As Ms. Fields explains in the video, President Harding, unlike Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, slashed government spending.

New Video Punctures Myths about Great Depression, Exposes Damaging Impact of Statist Policies by Hoover and FDR is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The latest canard offered for keeping taxpayers on the hook for mortgage risk is that, without such, homeownership would limited to the wealthy.  Sarah Rosen Wartell of the Center for American Progress stated before the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets, “The high cost, limited availability, and high volatility of pre-New Deal mortgage finance meant that homeownership was effectively limited to the wealthy.”  Congressman Al Green repeated the point.  As I’ve generally found Sarah to be one of the more reasonable CAP employees, and that this is fundamentally an empirical question, I would have expected her to offer some evidence to support such a claim.  Alas, she did not.  So I will.

According to the US Census Bureau, at the turn of the century in 1900, the US homeownership rate was 46.5%.  I’m pretty sure that even Sarah wouldn’t claim that close to half of US households in 1900 were “wealthy.”  Interestingly enough, homeownership after the first 10 years of the New Deal was lower than before the New Deal.

While 46.5% is about 20 percentage points below the current rate, the population in 1900 was considerably younger, and one thing we do know is that homeownership is positively correlated with age.  In 1900, 54% of the US population was under the age of 25, a reasonable cut-off for homeownership.  Today, that number is 35%.  I don’t think it would be a stretch to say the greatest driver behind the homeownership rate over the last 100 years has been the aging of the US population, probably followed by the increase in household incomes (homeownership and income are also closely correlated).

Hopefully this will put to rest the myth that FDR and the New Deal gave homeownership to the masses.  The fact is that homeownership was fairly widespread long before the New Deal.  I await the next myth from the Fannie Mae apologists.   If they are wise, they will try one that isn’t so easily falsified.

Homeownership Before the New Deal is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

In light of today’s reading of the Constitution in the new House, what misinterpretations of the Constitution do you regularly see in American politics? And are House Republicans implying that the previous Democratic majority did not have a firm grasp of the government’s founding document?

My response:

Thanks to the Tea Party, as I wrote in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, Congress seems to be rediscovering the Constitution — or at least many House Republicans seem to be. When members read the document aloud today, apparently for the first time in the nation’s history, they’ll be throwing down a marker: “We take the Constitution seriously, and intend to abide by its principles.” If true, how refreshing.

This is not a partisan matter. As many Republicans have said — albeit, some only after November’s elections — both parties for years have ignored the Constitution’s limits on political power. To confirm that, we need look no further than to James Madison, the principal author of the document, who assured skeptical ratifiers in Federalist 45 that the powers authorized by the Constitution were “few and defined.” That hardly describes today’s federal behemoth.

Thus, the main “misinterpretation” has been over the very idea of constitutional limits — particularly as inherent in the doctrine of enumerated powers, the principle that “We the People” gave Congress only 18 enumerated powers. The Commerce Clause, for example, was written mainly to ensure interstate commerce unfettered by state interference, not to enable Congress to regulate every aspect of life. And the General Welfare Clause was meant to limit Congress’s taxing power pursuant to its enumerated ends to objects of national, not particular, concern: it wasn’t meant to enable Congress to redistribute private wealth at will.

The great change came during the New Deal, of course, after FDR’s infamous Court packing threat, when a cowed Court began turning the Constitution on its head. But don’t take my word for that constitutional legerdemain. Here’s Roosevelt, writing to the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in 1935: “I hope your committee will not permit doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation.” And here’s Rexford Tugwell, one of the principal architects of the New Deal, reflecting on his handiwork some 30 years later: “To the extent that these new social virtues [i.e., New Deal policies] developed, they were tortured interpretations of a document [i.e., the Constitution] intended to prevent them.” They knew exactly what they were doing.

So when today’s liberals tell us the Constitution authorizes the vast federal programs that now reduce so many Americans to government dependents, they reveal their historical ignorance — or their political ambition. And they’re reduced to the silliness we saw in Tuesday’s New York Times, where the Times editorialists ranted against today’s constitutional reading as “a theatrical production of unusual pomposity.” Illustrating their own penchant for pomposity, they then dug into their bag of adjectives and let loose: “a self-important flourish,” “their Beltway insider ritual of self-glorification,” “a presumptuous and self-righteous act,” “an air of vacuous fundamentalism,” ”all of this simply eyewash,” “a ghastly waste of time.” They must have been emotionally drained when they finished their screed.

The Constitution is not a blank slate, details to follow, as decided by transient majorities. Were it that, it never would have been ratified. After all, we fought a revolution to rid ourselves of overweening government, and fought a Civil War to institute at last the grand principles of the Declaration of Independence. Nor will those principles be restored in a day. But today’s reading will start a debate that is sorely needed, at the end of which one can hope for restoration.

Toward Restoring Constitutional Government is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In a recent Wall Street Journal oped, Carnegie-Mellon economist Allan Meltzer explains how ObamaCare is delaying economic recovery:

Two overarching reasons explain the failure of Obamanomics. First, administration economists and their outside supporters neglected the longer-term costs and consequences of their actions. Second, the administration and Congress have through their deeds and words heightened uncertainty about the economic future. High uncertainty is the enemy of investment and growth…

Mr. Obama has denied the cost burden on business from his health-care program, but business is aware that it is likely to be large. How large? That’s part of the uncertainty that employers face if they hire additional labor…

Then there is Medicaid, the medical program for those with lower incomes. In the past, states paid about half of the cost, and they are responsible for 20% of the additional cost imposed by the program’s expansion. But almost all the states must balance their budgets, and the new Medicaid spending mandated by ObamaCare comes at a time when states face large deficits and even larger unfunded liabilities for pensions. All this only adds to uncertainty about taxes and spending.

Meltzer concludes that the Obama administration is making the same mistake as FDR: “President Roosevelt slowed recovery in 1938-40 until the war by creating uncertainty about his objectives. It was harmful then, and it’s harmful now.”

For more on the harm caused by government-created uncertainty, read my colleague Tad DeHaven’s recent posts.

ObamaCare Is Undermining Economic Recovery, Job Growth is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

During a recent CNBC debate on federal spending, I argued that government policies are creating uncertainty in the business community. Businesses are reluctant to invest or hire because they’re concerned that the president’s big government agenda will mean higher taxes and more onerous regulations.

I mentioned that every business owner I’ve spoken with has expressed this concern. In fact, the owner of the TV studio I was in told me that he wants to hire more employees but is afraid he may have to turn around and fire them later on thanks to Washington. My debate opponent dismissed my argument on the basis that “you cannot conduct macroeconomic policy by anecdote.”

Unfortunately, there is plenty of evidence to support my concern beyond what I’ve heard from folks in the business community. Yesterday, the chairman of the Business Roundtable, which the Washington Post calls “President Obama’s closest ally in the business community,” said that the president and his Democratic allies are creating an “increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation.”

From the article:

Ivan G. Seidenberg, chief executive of Verizon Communications, said that Democrats in Washington are pursuing tax increases, policy changes and regulatory actions that together threaten to dampen economic growth and “harm our ability . . . to grow private-sector jobs in the U.S.”

“In our judgment, we have reached a point where the negative effects of these policies are simply too significant to ignore,” Seidenberg said in a lunchtime speech to the Economic Club of Washington. “By reaching into virtually every sector of economic life, government is injecting uncertainty into the marketplace and making it harder to raise capital and create new businesses.”

Big businesses aren’t the only ones complaining. Surveys of small businesses conducted by the National Federation of Independent Business continue to point to government taxes and regulations as their single biggest obstacle.

Even the Washington Post’s editorial page is now acknowledging that government-induced uncertainty is an issue:

But as analysts ponder the mystery of weak private-sector hiring despite signs of economic growth, it’s worth asking what role is played by government-induced uncertainty. With the federal government promoting major changes in health care, financial regulation and energy law, it wouldn’t be surprising if some companies are more inclined to wait and see than they might otherwise be. And that’s especially true when they look at looming American indebtedness and the effect that could have on long-term interest rates.

The uncertainty caused by expanding government that we are facing today isn’t a new phenomenon. Economist Robert Higgs coined the phrase “regime uncertainty” in a study that showed that FDR’s anti-business policies prolonged the Great Depression. Had the Roosevelt administration heeded the “anecdotes” from the business community in the 1930s, perhaps the country could have been spared some pain. Let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself.

Uncertainty More Than Anecdotal is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I’ve been arguing for a while that “regime uncertainty” is stifling the economy’s ability to recover. Businesses are more reluctant to invest or hire when Washington pursues a policy agenda that could be detrimental to their bottom lines. The phrase was coined by economist Robert Higgs who observed that FDR’s anti-business policies prolonged the Great Depression.

Unfortunately, the media has generally ignored the possibility that uncertainty being generated by the president’s policies has been contributing to the nation’s continuing economic problems. However, an editorial in yesterday’s Washington Post could be a welcome sign that the media is beginning to take notice:

But as analysts ponder the mystery of weak private-sector hiring despite signs of economic growth, it’s worth asking what role is played by government-induced uncertainty. With the federal government promoting major changes in health care, financial regulation and energy law, it wouldn’t be surprising if some companies are more inclined to wait and see than they might otherwise be. And that’s especially true when they look at looming American indebtedness and the effect that could have on long-term interest rates.

The latest survey from the National Federation of Independent Business shows that big government remains the chief concern of the business community. When asked what their single most important problem was, 35 percent of small business owners cited “taxes” or “government regulations and red tape.” “Poor sales” was second at 30 percent.

The NFIB also cites uncertainty caused by Washington as a problem:

A huge help in moving toward a stronger economy for small business owners would be to “do no harm”. But Congress continues to pass and propose legislation that increases the cost of running a business and create huge uncertainty about future costs.

Only 3 percent of business owners cited finance as their chief problem. Yet, President Obama is pushing a $30 billion package to increase lending to small businesses. The business community doesn’t need more subsidized credit backed by taxpayers — it needs relief from the president’s agenda.

Washington Post Cites ‘Regime Uncertainty’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

One of the topics Chris Edwards will be discussing with Glenn Beck this evening (5:00 EST, Fox) is the “Not-So-Great Depression” of 1920-21.

Cato Senior Fellow Jim Powell notes that President Warren G. Harding inherited from his predecessor Woodrow Wilson “a post–World War I depression that was almost as severe, from peak to trough, as the Great Contraction from 1929 to 1933 that FDR would later inherit.”

However, instead of calling for bigger government to right the economy, as President Obama did upon inheriting George Bush’s mess, Harding pushed for spending and tax cuts.

The result?

With Harding’s tax and spending cuts and relatively non-interventionist economic policy, GNP rebounded to $74.1 billion in 1922. The number of unemployed fell to 2.8 million— a reported 6.7 percent of the labor force— in 1922. So, just a year and a half after Harding became president, the Roaring Twenties were underway. The unemployment rate continued to decline, reaching an extraordinary low of 1.8 percent in 1926. Since then, the unemployment rate has been lower only once in wartime (1944), and never in peacetime.

The following chart shows federal spending from 1920 to 1940:

Cutting Government Spending in a Recession is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This has not been a good week for the national Democratic Party. Along with losing the Massachusetts Senate seat, the party took another step toward making hostility to trade liberalization a plank of party orthodoxy.

As my Cato colleague Sallie James flagged earlier today, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee issued a press release yesterday criticizing a Republican candidate in upstate New York for contributing to the Cato Institute. And, of course, everyone knows that Cato is “a right wing extremist group that has long been a vocal advocate for extremist, unfair trade policies that would allow companies to ship American jobs overseas.”

Among our sins, in the eyes of the DCCC, is that Cato research has supported tariff-reducing trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Our work has also advocated unilateral trade liberalization—getting rid of self-damaging U.S. trade barriers regardless of what other countries do—which violates the conventional Washington wisdom that we can’t lower our own barriers without demanding “reciprocity” and “a level playing field” from other nations

There is nothing extreme about our work on trade. It fits comfortably within mainstream economics expounded not only by Adam Smith and Milton Freidman but by such liberals as Paul Samuelson and Larry Summers.

In fact, for decades, the Democratic Party embraced lower barriers to trade:

• In the 1930s and ’40s, President Franklin Roosevelt and his Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning Secretary of State Cordell Hull lead the United States away from the disastrous protectionism of President Hoover and a Republican Congress.
• Democratic Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter all supported successful agreements in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to reduce trade barriers at home and abroad.
• Bill Clinton, the only Democrat to be re-elected president since FDR, persuaded a Democratic Congress to enact NAFTA in 1993 and the Uruguay Round Agreements Act in 1994, which created the World Trade Organization. Clinton also championed permanent normal trade relations with China in 2000, which ushered that nation into the WTO.
• In the previous Congress, scores of House Democrats co-sponsored “The Affordable Footwear Act,” which would have unilaterally lowered tariffs on imported shoes popular with low-income Americans. Liberal Democrat Earl Blumenauer of Oregon visited the Cato Institute in July 2008 to speak in favor of the bill. (Will he be the next target of a DCCC press release for cavorting with “extremists”?) In the current Congress, a similar bill in the Senate is currently co-sponsored by such prominent Democrats as Dick Durban (Ill.), Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), and Mary Landrieu (La.).

To learn more about why Democrats (and Republicans) should support free trade, I highly recommend two books: Mad about Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization, by yours truly; and Freedom From Want: Liberalism and the Global Economy, by Edward Gresser, a trade expert with the Democratic Leadership Council.

Was Bill Clinton Also an “Extremist” on Trade? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• David Boaz on Obama’s first year: “From this libertarian, Obama’s first year looks grim. …He may well end up like Lyndon Johnson, with an ambitious domestic agenda eventually bogged down by endless war. But I don’t think his wished-for FDR model — a transformative agenda that is both popular and long-lasting — is in the cards.”

• The message from Massachusetts: “There can be no denying that this election was a clear cut rejection of the Democratic health care bills.”

• Attacks from all sides: See what happens when the Right takes on free enterprise.

• A new dictator in Iraq?

• Podcast: Daniel Ikenson discusses Obama’s trade policy.

Wednesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Andrew C. McCarthy has an article up  at National Review criticizing a recent decision by Obama administration officials to improve the detention procedures in Bagram, Afghanistan.

McCarthy calls the decision an example of pandering to a “despotic” judiciary that is imposing its will on a war that should be run by the political branches. McCarthy’s essay is factually misleading, ignores the history of wartime detention in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, and encourages the President to ignore national security decisions coming out of the federal courts.

More details after the jump.

McCarthy is Factually Misleading

McCarthy begins by criticizing a decision by District Judge John Bates to allow three detainees in Bagram, Afghanistan, to file habeas corpus petitions testing the legitimacy of their continued detention. McCarthy would have you believe that this is wrong because they are held in a combat zone and that they have already received an extraordinary amount of process by wartime detention standards. He is a bit off on both accounts.

First, this is not an instance where legal privileges are “extended to America’s enemies in Afghanistan.” The petition from Bagram originally had four plaintiffs, none of whom were captured in Afghanistan – they were taken into custody elsewhere and moved to Bagram, which is quite a different matter than a Taliban foot soldier taken into custody after an attack on an American base. As Judge Bates says in his decision, “It is one thing to detain t

hose captured on the surrounding battlefield at a place like Bagram, which [government attorneys] correctly maintain is in a theater of war. It is quite another thing to apprehend people in foreign countries – far from any Afghan battlefield – and then bring them to a theater of war, where the Constitution arguably may not reach.”

Judge Bates also took into account the political considerations of hearing a petition from Haji Wazir, an Afghan man detained in Dubai and then

moved to Bagram. Because of the diplomatic implications of ruling on an Afghan who is on Afghan soil, Bates dismissed Wazir’s petition. So much for judicial “despotism” and judicial interference on the battlefield, unless you define the world as your battlefield.

Second, the detainees have not been given very much process. Their detentions have been approved in “Unlawful Enemy Combatant Review Boards.” Detainees in these proceedings have no American representative, are not present at the hearings, and submit a written statement as to why they should be released without any knowledge of what factual basis the government is using to justify their detention. This is far less than the Combatant Status Review Tribunal procedures held insufficient in the Supreme Court’s Boumediene ruling.

Yes, Fix Detention in Afghanistan

McCarthy then chides the Obama administration for trying to get ahead of the courts by affording more process to detainees: “See, we can give the enemy more rights without a judge ordering us to do so!”

Well, yes. We should fix the detention procedures used in Afghanistan to provide the adequate “habeas substitute” required by Boumediene so that courts either: (1) don’t see a need to intervene; or (2) when they do review detention, they ratify the military’s decision more often than not.

Thing is, the only substitute for habeas is habeas. Habeas demands a hearing, with a judge, with counsel for both the detainee and the government, and a weighing of evidence and intelligence that a federal court will take seriously. If the military does this itself, then the success rate in both detaining the right people and sustaining detention decisions upon review are improved.

This is nothing new or unprecedented. Salim Hamdan, Usama Bin Laden’s driver, received such a hearing prior to his military commission. The CSRT procedures that the Bagram detainees are now going to face were insufficient to subject Hamdan to a military commission, so Navy Captain Keith Allred granted Hamdan’s motion for a hearing under Article V of the Geneva Conventions to determine his legal status.

Allred found that Hamdan’s service to Al Qaeda as Osama Bin Laden’s driver and occasional bodyguard, pledge of bayat (allegiance) to Bin Laden, training in a terrorist camp, and transport of weapons for Al Qaeda and affiliated forces supported finding him an enemy combatant. Hamdan was captured at a roadblock with two surface-to-air missiles in the back of his vehicle. The Taliban had no air force; the only planes in the sky were American. Hamdan was driving toward Kandahar, where Taliban and American forces were engaged in a major battle. The officer that took Hamdan into custody took pictures of the missiles in Hamdan’s vehicle before destroying them.

Hamdan’s past association with the Ansars (supporters), a regularized fighting unit under the Taliban, did not make him a lawful combatant. Though the Ansars wore uniforms and bore their arms openly, Hamdan was taken into custody in civilian clothes and had no distinctive uniform or insignia. Based on his “direct participation in hostilities” and lack of actions to make him a lawful combatant, Captain Allred found that Hamdan was an unlawful enemy combatant.

Hamdan’s Article V hearing should be the template for battlefield detention. Charles “Cully” Stimson at the Heritage Foundation, a judge in the Navy JAG reserves and former Bush administration detainee affairs official, wrote a proposal to do exactly that, Holding Terrorists Accountable: A Lawful Detention Framework for the Long War.

The more we legitimize and regularize these decisions, the better off we are. Military judges should be writing decisions on detention and publishing declassified versions in military law reporters. One of the great tragedies of litigating the detainees from the early days in Afghanistan is that a number were simply handed to us by the Northern Alliance with little to no proof and plenty of financial motive for false positives. My friends in the service tell me that we are still running quite a catch-and-release program in Afghanistan. I attribute this to arguing over dumb cases from the beginning of the war when we had little cultural awareness and a far less sophisticated intelligence apparatus. Detention has become a dirty word. By not establishing a durable legal regime for military detention, we created lawfare fodder for our enemies and made it politically costly to detain captured fighters.

The Long-Term Picture

McCarthy, along with too many on the Right, is fixated on maintaining executive detention without legal recourse as our go-to policy for incapacitating terrorists and insurgents. In the long run we need to downshift our conflicts from warmaking to law enforcement, and at some point detention transitions to trial and conviction.

McCarthy might blast me for using the “rule of law” approach that he associates with the Left and pre-9/11 counterterrorism efforts. Which is fine, since, just as federal judges “have no institutional competence in the conduct of war,” neither do former federal prosecutors.

Counterterrorism and counterinsurgency are not pursued solely by military or law enforcement means. We should use both. The military is a tool of necessity, but in the long run, the law is our most effective weapon.

History dictates an approach that uses military force as a means to re-impose order and the law to enforce it. The United States did this in Iraq, separating hard core foreign fighters from local flunkies and conducting counterinsurgency inside its own detention facilities. The guys who were shooting at Americans for a quick buck were given some job training and signed over to a relative who assumed legal responsibility for the detainee’s oath not to take up arms again. We moved detainees who could be connected to specific crimes into the Iraqi Central Criminal Court for prosecution. We did all of this under the Law and Order Task Force, establishing Iraqi criminal law as the law of the land.

We did the same in Vietnam, establishing joint boards with the Vietnamese to triage detainees into Prisoner of War, unlawful combatant, criminal defendant, and rehabilitation categories.

The Washington Post article on our detention reforms in Afghanistan indicates that we are following a pattern similar to past conflicts. How this is a novel and dangerous course of action escapes me.

Who’s the Despot Here?

McCarthy points to FDR as a model for our actions in this conflict between the Executive and Judiciary branches. He says that the President should ignore the judgments of the courts in the realm of national security and their “despotic” decrees. I do not think this word means what he thinks it means.

FDR was the despot in this chapter of American history, threatening to pack the Supreme Court unless they adopted an expansive view of federal economic regulatory power. The effects of an expansive reading of the Commerce Clause are felt today in an upending of the balance of power that the Founders envisioned between the states and the federal government.

McCarthy does not seem bothered by other historical events involving the President’s powers as Commander-in-Chief in the realm of national security. The Supreme Court has rightly held that the President’s war powers do not extend to breaking strikes at domestic factories when Congress declined to do so during the Korean War, trying American citizens by military commission in places where the federal courts are still open and functioning, and declaring the application of martial law to civilians unconstitutional while World War II was under way.

The Constitution establishes the Judiciary as a check on the majoritarian desires of the Legislature and the actions of the Executive, even during wartime. To think otherwise is willful blindness.

Bagram, Habeas, and the Rule of Law is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

With the economy in a deep recession and policymakers turning to massive government intervention in an attempt to create jobs and bolster the financial system—it feels like the 1930s all over again.  Today’s new New Deal is rapidly unfolding, with the Obama administration and many lawmakers making it clear that any question of the success of FDR’s New Deal policies was resolved long ago: government intervention worked, and history bears repeating.  

However, there are deep disagreements about the New Deal, and whether Roosevelt’s policies deepened the depression and delayed recovery. 

Join us at the Cato Institute on June 1 to be a part of a highly informative half-day conference. Recognized national experts will discuss the economic and legal impact of the New Deal, and how its legacy is being used and misused to shape policy responses to current economic hardships.

Brother, Can You Spare A Trillion? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Barack Obama based his candidacy in part on the promise to set a new tone in Washington.  But we saw a much older tone emerge with his demonization of hedge funds over the Chrysler bankruptcy.  Reports the Washington Post:

President Obama’s harsh attack on hedge funds he blamed for forcing Chrysler into bankruptcy yesterday sparked cries of protest from the secretive financial firms that hold about $1 billion of the automaker’s debt.

Hedge funds and investment managers were irate at Obama’s description of them as “speculators” who were “refusing to sacrifice like everyone else” and who wanted “to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.”

“Some of the characterizations that were used today to refer to us as speculators or to say we’re looking for a bailout is really unfair,” said one executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. “What we’re looking for is a reasonable payout on the value of the debt . . . more in line with what unions and Fiat were getting.”

George Schultze, the managing member of the hedge fund Schultze Asset Management, a Chrysler bondholder, said, “We are simply seeking to enforce our bargained-for rights under well-settled law.”

“Hopefully, the bankruptcy process will help refocus on this issue rather than on pointing fingers at lenders,” he said.

I won’t claim any special expertise to parse who is responsible for what in the crash of the U.S.  (meaning Big Three) auto industry.  However, attacking people for exercising their legal rights and trashing those who make their business investing in companies hardly seems like the right way to get the U.S. economy moving again.

During the Depression, FDR’s relentless attacks on business and the rich almost certainly added to a climate of uncertainty that discouraged investment during tough times.  Why put your money at real risk when the president and his cohorts seem determined to treat you like the enemy?  While President Obama need not treat gently those who contributed to the current crisis by acting illegally or unscrupulously, he should not act as if those who simply aren’t willing to turn their economic futures over to the tender mercies of the White House are criminals.

We’ve just lived through eight years of bitter partisan warfare.  The president shouldn’t replace that with a jihad against businesses that resist increased government direction of the economy.

Like FDR — In a Really Bad Way is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The NEA demands that “a dying laissez faire must be destroyed,” and calls on the president to nationalize the credit agencies, utilities and major industries (see AP story at right), and we hear hardly a peep from the punditocracy. Strange.

Well, okay, I’m not actually surprised. This is a real story that actually ran on March 1st… 1934. I tweaked the image to refer to president Obama rather than FDR.

It’s taken three quarters of a century, but the NEA’s plan to nationalize the credit agencies and major industries seems to have finally gotten under way, particularly given the recent assertion of federal control over GM.

One advantage of the delay is that we now have generations of experience with another state-run industry, education, as a guide for what to expect from the latest state takeovers.

And since the president (Obama, not FDR) is starting with GM, it seems only fitting to take a look at the public schools of Detroit. Rather than give you the typical statistical wonkery, though, I thought I’d point readers to this compelling photo essay.

After flipping through it, do you think the Detroit auto industry would have worked better over these past 75 years if it had been run like the Detroit public schools?

NEA Asks President to Nationalize Industries is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Cato Executive Vice President David Boaz debates Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress, over the legacies of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.

In light of the current economic crisis, who serves as the better role model for President Obama?

For more videos, subscribe to Cato’s YouTube channel.

New on YouTube: Roosevelt v. Reagan is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There has been much recent debate about whether or not President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies increased the nation’s economic pain during the Great Depression or led to its end. In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, Regulation Magazine managing editor Thomas A. Firey reveals why erroneous stories about the effects of the New Deal survive despite decades of economic research that tell a different, more nuanced story:

Listening to the fight today among commentators on the left and the right talking about the New Deal and making various claims about it, as far as a stimulus—they’re almost all wrong, and what’s most disturbing to me as an economic historian is this is actually pretty well-plowed ground, so I don’t know how they can be wrong and how no one’s calling them out on it….

…The two stylized stories, the one that nothing got better and the other that the New Deal miraculously fixed everything—both are very clearly wrong when you look at the numbers. But no one wants to tell the real story, because, first of all, it doesn’t fall nicely in an ideological story on either side, and, second of all, it requires work. You have to read stuff and do research and care about the facts, and, let’s be honest, in this political environment, very few people do those things or care about the facts.

More from Firey on the effects of the New Deal.

Add the Cato Daily Podcast to your RSS Feed.

What Did the New Deal Do? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

While Barack Obama’s economics team hammers out its $800 billion fiscal stimulus plan, the commentariat is battling over the effectiveness of what some consider the prototype stimulus package, the New Deal.* The suppressed (and problematic) conclusion to all this punditry seems to be: Because government spending under the New Deal helped/didn’t help to end the Great Depression, the Obama stimulus plan will/won’t help to end the current recession.

One of the opening salvos was this exchange between George Will (anti-New Deal) and Paul Krugman (pro). More recently, New York Times editorial board member Adam Cohen (pro) wrote this column, responding to an op-ed by former Business Week bureau chief Andrew Wilson (anti) in the Wall Street Journal.

So who’s right? Did New Deal government spending “help,” as Cohen puts it?

To answer that, we first have to define Cohen’s term — what would it mean to say that government spending under the New Deal “helped”? Two possibilities come to mind:

• New Deal spending boosted consumption, thereby increasing production, reducing unemployment, and ending the Depression.
• New Deal spending aided people who would have otherwise been destitute during the Depression.

The first sense considers the New Deal as a stimulus program to revive the economy; the second considers it as a welfare program to aid the poor. The two notions are far from equivalent. My reading of the literature suggests that the New Deal did little as an economic stimulus, but it did provide welfare benefits.

The figure below sketches U.S. GDP and government spending (all levels) for the Great Depression era. The wildly fluctuating GDP line clearly marks the Great Contraction of 1929-1932, the Recession within the Depression of 1937–1938, and the return of GDP to pre-crash levels in 1940. In contrast, government spending has only a very mild upward slope over the period (until the 1941 ramping-up for World War II). In 1930, the second year of Herbert Hoover’s administration, government spending totaled $10 billion; at the height of the New Deal spending boom in 1936, government spending reached $13.1 billion. (In comparison, that rate of government spending growth is just below the average for the entire post-WWII era.) This raises the question of whether there was much New Deal fiscal stimulus at all.

We get a somewhat different view if we consider the federal budget surplus/deficit. Much of the benefit of fiscal stimulus is supposed to come from the fact that it’s deficit spending. In essence, government borrowing moves future consumption to the present and hopefully boosts the economy to a permanently higher level. As the figure below shows, the federal government dramatically ramped up deficit spending in the last year of Hoover’s administration, as tax receipts sagged and Hoover enacted his own emergency programs. FDR continued the borrowing to fund components of the New Deal.

However, this borrowing was not dramatic by today’s standards. As a share of GDP, the New Deal deficit peaked at 5.4 percent of GDP ($3.6 billion) in 1934; in dollar terms, it peaked at $5.1 billion (4.3 percent of GDP) in 1936. In contrast, President-elect Obama recently announced that he expects ”trillion-dollar deficits for years to come,” even without the $800 billion stimulus package that his administration is preparing. With a U.S. GDP of roughly $13.8 trillion, the Obama-projected deficit (not counting the stimulus package) represents 7.2 percent of GDP.

Does the New Deal experience thus suggest that, when it comes to fiscal stimulus, just a little bit can have large effects? Interestingly, economic research suggests the opposite. Long before she was named chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer wrote a short paper for the Journal of Economic History titled “What Ended the Great Depression?” The paper provides empirical evidence that FDR’s fiscal policy provided little stimulus during the Great Depression. As shown in the figure below (reproduced from Romer’s article), the results of the New Deal’s fiscal stimulus (solid line) were little different from what she projects would have resulted from “normal fiscal policy” (dotted line). Both the deficit spending and the multiplier effect from that spending were too small to budge GDP.

What did end the Great Depression? Romer argues that another FDR policy — doubling the fixed exchange rate for the dollar relative to gold — did the trick, though the New Dealers seem to have lucked into that result rather than planned it. The rate change worked as a monetary stimulus, inducing large gold flows into the United States, where they could now buy twice as many dollars. That buttressed bank deposits and increased bank willingness to lend, encouraging investment. The lending resulted in a sharp increase in the money supply, pushing against the Depression’s price deflation and encouraging consumption. From the moment the exchange rate changed, the United States began to climb out of the Depression — albeit slowly; more slowly than many other countries.

Romer’s explanation dovetails with Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s work on the root cause of the Depression: the Federal Reserve’s sharp reduction of the money supply in the late 1920s, in order to moderate the stock market boom and return the United States to the pre-WWI dollar-gold exchange rate. It also dovetails with evidence that other nations’ recoveries from the Great Contraction began soon after they abandoned efforts to return their currencies to pre-war gold exchange rates. My reading of the economic literature indicates that the “monetary policy did it” thesis has been generally accepted by economic historians (contra Cohen’s graf 9).

So it was FDR’s monetary policy that ended the Great Depression, not such New Deal initiatives as the WPA, the CCC, NIRA, and the rest of the alphabet soup. This follows the findings of a later paper that Romer co-authored with husband David Romer on U.S. recessions in the post-WWII era, which found that monetary stimulus proved superior to discretionary fiscal stimulus in restoring the economy.

What, then, to make of our warring pundits? In the fight between Krugman and Will over the stimulatory effects of the New Deal, it seems that opposing sides can both be wrong. Will was incorrect to argue that economic conditions grew worse during the New Deal era — conditions did improve, albeit slowly, and were temporarily reversed by the Recession within the Depression. Krugman, on the other hand, was wrong to argue that FDR’s fiscal stimulus helped to remedy the Depression and that only the large fiscal stimulus of WWII ended the Depression — in fact, GDP had returned to pre-Crash trend (as calculated by Romer) by 1940. And both mischaracterize the 1937–1938 Recession in the Depression. Although federal deficit spending did decrease along with the economy, the recession appears to have been largely the product of onerous new banking regulations that weakened the monetary stimulus (a point that today’s eager-to-regulate Congress should bear in mind).

Concerning Wilson and Cohen, Wilson goes too far in claiming that FDR (and Hoover) “were jointly responsible for turning a panic into the worst depression of modern times.” If anyone merits that distinction, it is the Federal Reserve for its pre-Crash contractionary monetary policy. Cohen is wrong to claim that “as a matter of economics … F.D.R’s spending programs did help the economy.” However, he does have a point that the various New Deal jobs programs provided income for many people who would have otherwise been destitute. As indicated in the figure below, at their height, the programs provided “emergency jobs” to just over 40 percent of laborers who likely would have otherwise been jobless. As state unemployment insurance and federal safety net programs largely did not exist at the time of the Crash, the New Deal jobs programs were likely a godsend for those who got the jobs (though they did little for the millions more who didn’t). Today, however, several government programs provide income and other benefits to the jobless and the poor, so the welfare benefits of the New Deal do not need to be replicated.

Where does all of this leave us in evaluating policy responses to the current recession?

First, the economic history of the New Deal and the rest of the 20th century raises serious doubts about the effectiveness of discretionary fiscal stimulus packages in reversing an economic downturn. Monetary stimulus has a far better track record (which is not to say that we shouldn’t have concerns about such policy — but that is a discussion for another blog post). And though there is no longer a fixed gold exchange rate for the dollar and the Fed has dropped nominal short-term interest rates to near zero, the Fed has other monetary weapons that it can use to fight this recession. Second, the helpful welfare benefits of the New Deal are now carried out automatically by other government programs.

This leaves us with an important question that has so far gone unasked by the commentariat: Given the above, is $800 billion in new government deficit spending worthwhile?

* As Tyler Cowen points out, it’s wrong to think of the New Deal as a comprehensive, unified set of fiscal initiatives; FDR tried many different policies, and sometimes changed approaches, to fight the Depression.

Did the New Deal ‘Help’? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Politico reports that Vice President-elect Joe Biden has been comparing our current economic troubles to the 9/11 attacks.

“We’re at war,” Biden told congressional leaders of both parties during their sit-down with Barack Obama in the Capitol, according to two sources familiar with the exchange.

Libertarians and conservatives who fear that Obama’s inauguration heralds the coming of a new New Deal have new cause for discomfort, then.  FDR’s embrace of the war metaphor was central to building support for the New Deal:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected in a landslide in 1932, wasn’t the only political figure to analogize America’s economic collapse to an attack by a hostile power; his predecessor Hoover had made the comparison regularly. F.D.R. employed the war metaphor far more effectively, however. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address tends to be remembered as an attempt to calm the public, a warning against “fear itself.” The martial metaphors that appear throughout the speech make clear, though, that F.D.R. wanted fear replaced by collectivist ardor. Americans were to move forward as “a trained and loyal army,” with “a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.” Should the normal balance of legislative and executive powers prove insufficient, Roosevelt concluded, “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis–broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

Two days after his inauguration, Roosevelt used the Trading with the Enemy Act to order the closure of all American banks. Passed during World War I, the act was designed to restrict trade with hostile foreign powers “during the time of war.” Ignoring that limitation, Roosevelt wielded it in peacetime against Americans. It would not be the last time his administration would invoke powers forged in the Great War to battle the Depression. “Progressives turned instinctively to the war mobilization as a design for recovery,” wrote historian William Leuchtenburg in his essay “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” “There was scarcely a New Deal act or agency that did not owe something to the experience of World War I.”

Of course, viewing anything Joe Biden says as an example of calculated rhetoric may be a mistake.  As the character Hesh Rabkin once noted of the Sopranos matriarch Livia, “Between brain and mouth there is no interlocutor.”

What Is It Good For? Centralizing Power. is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog