Concerning the new Cato Policy Report and its essay “How FDR Prolonged the Great Depression,” Jim Powell has much to say about M. Friedman but never mentions Rothbard’s great 1963 treatise America’s Great Depression. Ron Neff of The Last Ditch comments:
In the lead article of the current CATO POLICY REPORT (July/August 2003; Vol. XXV, No. 4), Jim Powell writes about Franklin Roosevelt’s reputation as the white knight who rescued America from the despair of the Depression; his thesis is that Roosevelt’s reputation is “headed for a crash.”
The first crack in the conventional wisdom,” writes Powell, “appeared with the publication in 1963 of Friedman and Schwartz’s MONETARY HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.”
It is worth remembering that that same year saw the publication of Murray Rothbard’s GREAT DEPRESSION (D. Van Nostrand Company). I am unable to say whether the Friedman and Schwartz book appeared before or after Rothbard’s. I am able to say that in Powell’s summaries of various studies of the failure of the New Deal (based on his newly published book on the Depression), he nowhere mentions Rothbard or his study.
I would probably have let all this pass without mention, but on the next page is Dave Boaz’s editorial, titled “The Importance of History.” As if that were not irony enough, the pull quote reads, “The truly great men are the ones who have fought for liberty, who have walked away from power,” a phrase that describes Rothbard far better than it does Friedman.
