Don Boudreaux, chairman of the economics department of George Mason University, monitors the economic coverage of major papers with a free-market eye. Often, he writes to the editors, also posting those queries on his Web site, cafehayek.com. Some recent epistles:

19 December 2006

The Editor, New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036

To the Editor:

Jerry Albert says that “Franklin D. Roosevelt raised America from its Depression-era depths” (Letters, Dec. 19). That’s the familiar myth. The reality — as economic historian Robert Higgs shows in his recent book Depression, War, and Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2006) — is that New Deal policies and the misguided fantasies that motivated them kept the economy mired in a deep depression for at least all of FDR’s first two terms in office. And because statistics from a command-and-control war-time economy reveal nothing about how well an economy truly is functioning, Higgs makes a strong case that the Great Depression likely didn’t end until 1946.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, Va.

22 December 2006

The Editor, New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036

To the Editor:

Lamenting the demise of the budget surpluses achieved on the watch of President Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce Robert Rubin, Paul Krugman says that “the whole conservative movement shared Mr. Bush’s squanderlust, his urge to run off with the money so carefully saved under Mr. Rubin’s leadership” (“Democrats and the Deficit,” Dec. 22). I’ll ignore Krugman’s own inconsistent call for Democrats now to spend regardless of the budgetary consequences. What galls me is his apparent ignorance of the work of my Nobel-laureate colleague James Buchanan.

Buchanan — whom Krugman would no doubt classify as a leading member of the “conservative movement” — has for a half-century consistently and forcefully argued for fiscal responsibility. Indeed, it was Buchanan’s brilliant 1958 book, Public Principles of Public Debt, that first exposed the foolishness of the then-dominant view that public debt is innocuous because, as the myth went, “we owe it to ourselves.”

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, Va.

22 December 2006

Editor, The Washington Post
1150 15th St., NW
Washington, DC 20071

Dear Editor:

In “Bloomberg’s Brave Bet on Innovation” (Dec. 22), E.J. Dionne alleges that “government succeeds more than we want to acknowledge. Ask any elderly person if he or she would prefer to live without Social Security and Medicare.”

Mr. Dionne’s standard for success is too lax. The appropriate question is “compared to what?” Are elderly persons better off than they would be if their pensions and medical care were not provided by government? Maybe; maybe not. But it’s difficult to tell because Americans are forced to participate in Social Security and Medicare. Private alternatives are crowded out.

Just because someone is reluctant to release the scrawny crow he holds in his hand does not mean that he would not prefer the flock of plump pheasants that might fly his way if government did not force us all to settle for crow.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, Va.