This is a review from the conservative blog “Associated Content.” While I don’t agree with the author’s conclusion, it’s important to consider his point of view.
The Audacity of Help by John F. Wasik is a defense of President Obama’s economic policies, based on his campaign promises, the passage of the stimulus package, and the proposal of his first budget. It is not very convincing.
The main virtue of The Audacity of Help is that it contains a very detailed description of what President Obama proposes to do, with a rationale of why he proposes to do it. The Audacity of Help falls down where it attempts to persuade the reader that these new economic policies are
desirable. The reason for this is in the underlining assumptions surrounding those policies.
The first chapter of The Audacity of Help is a brief description of the New Deal, from a liberal point of view, and about how it allegedly saved capitalism by creating a government bureaucracy to “manage it.” The implication is that Barack Obama is FDR reborn, come to fix the alleged excesses of capitalism that were allowed to run rampant under President Reagan and President George W. Bush.
The problem is that modern scholarship on the New Deal suggests that it actually prolonged the Great Depression by stifling private, economic activity and causing uncertainty about government economic policy. If Barack Obama wants to make a second New Deal, which John F. Wasik calls “the Green Deal”, after some of the more environmental aspects of Obama economic policy, then we’re in trouble.
There is a lot of verbiage about how the economic stimulus package was supposed to work, with the “shovel ready jobs” and more spending on science and technology. The reality of the stimulus package, as we know now at the close of the seventh month of the Obama Presidency is that it has not stimulated anything but the growth of government and pork barrel spending.
Indeed, reading The Audacity of Help against the background of the open revolt by the American people, as manifested by the tea party protests and the town hall confrontations, one gets the impression of reading a document whose time has already passed and whose relevancy has been
destroyed by events. The question about Barack Obama’s economic policies is no long how they will help, but rather how much they will hurt before they are stopped and hopefully reversed.
Source: The Audacity of Help, by John F. Wasik, Bloomberg Press, 2009
Tags: Associated Content, Economy, Obama, stimulus plan