New Deal Was A No Deal

The Wall Street Journal has a fine article about how the "New Deal" did not pull us out of the Great Depression but rather kept us in it by Economics Professors Cole of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Ohanian of UCLA.

The main lesson we have learned from the New Deal is that wholesale government intervention can -- and does -- deliver the most unintended of consequences. This was true in the 1930s, when artificially high wages and prices kept us depressed for more than a decade, it was true in the 1970s when price controls were used to combat inflation but just produced shortages. It is true today, when poorly designed regulation produced a banking system that took on too much risk.