Laissez-faire economist Thomas Sowell of Stanford University warns the incoming administration of the dangers of a new New Deal. Contradicting the conventional story of how FDR saved the economy after everyone lost their jobs because of the stock market crash, Sowell draws on Richard Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway’s Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America to show that Hoover’s protectionist tariffs were the actual catalyst for double-digit unemployment figures. Although unemployment rose as high as 9% a month after the crash in 1929, it later subsided to 6.3% in June 1930 (the current rate in the United States is 6.7%), when the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were passed. Within five months, unemployment had risen to double digits. From February 1932 through December 1934, it remained above 20%. Sowell writes, “The evidence suggests that it was not the ‘problem’ of the financial crisis in 1929 that caused massive unemployment but politicians’ attempted ‘solutions.’ Is that the history that we seem to be ready to repeat?” Fortunately for Barack Obama, Sowell argues, he “already has his Herbert Hoover to blame for any and all disasters that his policies create: George W. Bush.”

Another Great Depression? (by Thomas Sowell, National Review)