Terrifying

Read the whole thing at Investors:

But while everyone was picking apart these and other flaws in Obama's speech, they overlooked the most frightening line of all. That was when Obama promised that he'd pursue "the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued during the only crisis worse than this one."

That promise might have made liberal hearts swoon. But as Amity Shlaes explained in her outstanding history of the era — "The Forgotten Man" — it was precisely FDR's "bold, persistent experimentation" that was largely to blame for the length, depth and severity of the Great Depression.

Convinced that the government had to do something, FDR tinkered and experimented, she said, figuring that if he didn't "get it right the first time ... maybe he'd get it right the second time." But the very arbitrariness of FDR's actions, she found, made it impossible for businesses to make plans. And so, as FDR's bold experiments increased, business activity decreased and markets froze.