To the Editor:
Andrew Wilson is right: the New Deal did not end the Great Depression ("Five Myths About the Great Depression [1]," November 4). No less an authority than FDR's Treasury secretary and close friend, Henry Morganthau, conceded this fact to Congressional Democrats in May 1939: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong ... somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... And an enormous debt to boot!"*
Indeed, FDR's market-suffocating policies are almost surely what put the "Great" in "Great Depression."
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
* Burton Folsom, Jr., New Deal or Raw Deal? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), p. 2.
Don Boudreaux is the Chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University and a Business & Media Institute adviser.