Abstract
What Can We Learn from FDR's Mistakes? The title and content of the last chapter of the book FDR's Folly illustrate the real purpose of Jim Powell through this book. It defended a laissez faire approach to today's economic problems. This aim led him to emphasize the downside of the New Deal and leave aside what doesn't meet his thesis and highlight the positive achievements of the New deal. Noticing the author's apparent refusal to include anything that might possibly reflect favorably on the thirty-second president, John Moser ironically asked how such a bad president managed to be reelected thrice, and each time by a convincing margin. It is true that the historians of the New Deal had long been overwhelmingly adulatory. Even amongst the New Deal's opponents, historians who criticized Roosevelt for tampering with the free market had long been outnumbered by historians from the Marxist left. FDR's Folly would have usefully balanced the traditional analysis of the New Deal if the book had not been so one-sided. Indeed, there is a large amount of truth in FDR's Folly and this paper doesn't aim to refute this large part of the book. On the other hand, Jim Powell has a very debatable analysis of some measures of the New Deal and even more important, he omits a lot of positive achievements of the leader and as a result, he concludes negatively on the New Deal.
