Bloomberg syndicated columnist and financial expert Amity Shlaes punctured some commonly held beliefs about the Great Depression when she lectured at Campbell’s Lundy-Fetterman School of Business on Monday, Oct. 29, the anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash.Shlaes, a commentator on Public Radio’s “Marketplace” and former member of the editorial board of directors of the “Wall Street Journal,” argued that Franklin Roosevelt’s domestic reform programs under the New Deal have created a new “Forgotten Man,” not the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid that Roosevelt alluded to in his campaign speeches, but the man who “subsidizes the funding of other constituencies and haunts politics in all developed nations today.”In her book, “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression,” Shlaes argues that the New Deal which attempted to provide recovery and relief from the Great Depression through programs of agricultural and business regulation, inflation, price stabilization and public works, as well as economic institutions like Social Security, created an entitlement trap that places an extraordinary tax burden on citizens both present and future.”Roosevelt did inspire confidence,” Shlaes said. “Some of his programs like the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Deposit Insurance were brilliant, but his economic policies in general were not great and led to the creation of some egregious laws, as well as slower economic recovery.”The author of “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression,” Shlaes is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former columnist for the “Financial Times,” specializing in economics. She has twice been a finalist for the Loeb prize in commentary, her field’s best know prize. In 2002, she was co-winner of the Frederic Bastiat Prize, an international prize for writing on political economy, and spent several months at the American Academy in Berlin as the J.P. Morgan Fellow for the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of “The Greedy Hand,” a national bestseller on America’s experience with its tax code; “Germany: The Empire Within” and “Turning Intellect to Influence.”Shlaes was the visiting lecturer for the Lundy-Fetterman School of Business Politics, Law and Economics series.
Shlaes refutes conventional wisdom about Great Depression