How does your gummint grow?

Thank you, Dave, I’m so happy to have you do that. Once you’ve read Dave’s post, let me add a couple things:

1) Herbert Hoover was, in fact, a “progressive” within the 1910s definition of the word. But it’s famously true that there were many kinds of progressive. It’s also well known that some progressives supported the New Deal, while some opposed it.

2) To describe Hoover as an “interventionist” and therefore in the same mode as Roosevelt is just so profoundly stupid it’s hard to know what to say about it. As Dave points out, for much of his presidency Hoover’s “intervention” consisted of saying, “rah rah, go economy go!” And yes, when pressed to the very limit in an election year with a Democratic House Hoover backed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1932. Even then, though, the RFC did not act nearly so aggressively as it did under Roosevelt, under whom it bought bank equity and funded all kinds of other New Deal programs.

You see, some interventions might be effective, while some might be ineffective. As a smart guy said, “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works”.

On which point: