If Herbert Hoover had been as hands-off conservative as he is currently reputed to have been, the history of the mid-20th century might have been very different — at least in America. But his meddling efforts to right a wallowing economy in the wake of the stock market crash in October 1929 only made things worse. In an anachronistic example of inadvertant Orwellianism, Hoover’s nonexistent laissez-faire conservatism is now blamed for the Great Depression, when in fact the depression of the early ’30s became Great because Hoover’s successor followed the Republican’s inept meddling with … more meddling — cranked up to 11.
There was no reason for the recession of 2008-09 to have resulted in news like this. Had the Republican nominee in 2008 been electable, and had the economic policies pursued over the past 16 months been rationally grounded in a need to reassure consumers and investors that their losses would be within familiar, if larger than desired, bounds, we might very well have the beginnings of a recovery on our hands by now.
As it is, the only reassurance we can find in the current news is that the vanguard of the original recession, the Democrat-controlled Congress that began in 2007, will no longer be in charge in 2011. But it would be nice to know that their successors in congressional leadership understood what had been done wrong, and were sworn to set things right regardless of what Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) might say.
We can’t afford two full terms of Obama — but a third term of “compassionate” “conservatism” a la Bush wouldn’t be much better.
