A History Lesson for Truman Admirers

Like most right-minded fans of economics, I love the George Mason University Econ department and their quest for counterintuitive conclusions.  Sometimes, though, their contrarianism goes completely off the rails.  Recently, Masonomist Tyler Cowen reposted a few choice quotes from Masonomist John Nye’s recent article for the American Interest.

Harry Truman left office in 1953 a very unpopular man.  Almost no one at the time gave him credit for overseeing a period of rapid recovery that was much broader and more impressive than anything that happened under Roosevelt’s tenure — and this at a time when most economists predicted a deep postwar recession.  He did this while shrinking the government and dismantling wartime regulation at a rate Ronald Reagan could only have dreamed of.  He smoothly pulled us back from a regime of wage and price controls that could have easily been allowed to linger… Thanks to Truman we were once again moving in the direction of a competitive, open-access market economy… Yet Truman’s stellar reputation today owes nothing to his economic achievements, which most of those who today praise his foreign policy acumen know nothing about.

What?  He didn’t “smoothly pull us back from a regime of wage and price controls.”  The “do-nothing” Republican Congress that Truman got elected did that, against Truman’s will, and he repeatedly proposed their reinstatement afterwards.  Thankfully for the nation and the world, he largely failed.  It’s not a matter of opinion; it has to do with the real difference between what Truman proposed and what he got (occasionally via veto override).  It’s a matter of history.

To coin a phrase: “Economics fails.  Use history.”