[New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America. By Burton Folsom, Jr. Threshold Editions, 2008. Xvi + 318 pages.]

Readers of The Mises Review will not be surprised to learn that Folsom considers the New Deal a failure. Nevertheless, even those already familiar with such books as John T. Flynn’s The Roosevelt Myth will find Folsom’s book valuable. Folsom advances new and important arguments.

Many economists seem to think that the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle is an explanatory projected circumscribed by its dependence on the identification of lose money created by a central bank as the necessary explanans for the boom and bust cycle.  But this is not Hayek’s view, and a careful reading of Hayek makes is clear that Hayek considered other sources of th

President-elect Obama has announced that Paul Volker will head a new Economic Recovery Advisory Board that will propose interventionist policies to bring about economic recovery from the recession.

At the same time, Obama announced that University of Chicago economist, Austan Goolsbee, wil head the staff of this new advisory board.

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The Great Society is the lineal descendant and the intensification of those other pretentiously named policies of twentieth-century America: the Square Deal, the New Freedom, the New Era, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the New Frontier.

In the New York Review of Books, Paul Krugman calls for a “good old Keynesian stimulus.” He says we need to mimic Japan, Sweden, and FDR in terms of our strategy for giving new life to dead banks. Krugman, like Laurence Kotlikoff, is horrified that people are starting to save money.

This is F.A. Hayek in 1975 on Meet the Press. If you have never listened to a Mises.org podcast before, you must listen to this. I heard this Friday and I’ve been haunted by it ever since. A number of points stand out to me.

1) Hayek is amazing here. He holds the line. He is patient and explains very well. He refuses to relent. The core of his message is rooted in the Austrian view of cycles, and this interview demonstrates that he never stepped away from it, despite some far-flung claims.