One of the oddities of U.S. history is that Herbert Hoover is regarded as a free-market president. He grew federal spending by 52% in just four years. Engaged in massive deficit spending. Created the Federal Home Loan Bank. And the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Signed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs into law. And the Agricultural Marketing Act. And so on. Free-market, he was not.

The Hoover myth is showing some cracks, fortunately. Where most civics textbooks would blame Hoover’s laissez-faire policies for the Great…

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The $800 billion stimulus package pushed through by Obama has ignited a trade war with Canada, reports the Washington Post. In response to vague “buy American” provisions in the stimulus, “A number of Ontario towns, with a collective population of nearly 500,000, retaliated with measures effectively barring U.S. companies from their municipal contracts — the first shot in a larger campaign that could shut U.S. companies out of billions of dollars worth of Canadian projects.”

A trade war is also underway…

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Herbert Hoover ran up big budget deficits in response to the 1929 stock market crash, in an unsuccessful effort to stave off the Great Depression. That’s incontrovertible history. Even the web site maintained by the Obama White House, which has proposed record-setting budget deficits over the next decade, says Hoover ran up deficits.

But when someone points out that Hoover was a deficit-spender, liberal ideologues falsely claim in response that Hoover pushed for a balanced budget. Nothing supports those claims. But they are…

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As millions gather on the national mall today to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama, many are looking to the new president not only as a role model and the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream for America, but also as a leader capable of saving us from economic disaster.

Yet, it seems that the economy may not be in as bad a shape as some would have us believe.

The Minneapolis Federal Reserve says that things aren’t that bad. In fact,…

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So if the EU has just put together an agreement to reduce emissions by 20% by 2020, why are the climate alarmist groups calling it “a dark day” and “an embarrassment”?

Well, the answer is because the actual agreement is for a 4% reduction (also explained in the last link, but Roger Pielke Jr does it better). And that may be null and void if a global agreement doesn’t emerge at Copenhagen next year, which it probably won’t.

Note also that the “rich”…

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President-elect Obama wants a massive stimulus package of $700 billion or more.  But previous attempts to artificially stimulate the economy have generally been failures.  The $160 billion in stimulus rebates early in 2008 failed to stimulate the economy, much less prevent the financial crisis that followed, even as they drove up the federal deficit and the national debt, while punishing hard work and providing pork for left-wing special interest groups.

During the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt attempted to artificially stimulate the economy by…

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There are all sorts of people today who normally talk about free markets but who have got themselves into a tizzy over the failed bailout. We need to get one thing straight - the bailout was the wrong answer to the wrong question. To begin with, the plan was merely postponing the inevitable, as a letter in the Wall Street Journal pointed out this morning:

The lesson of past financial inflection points is that we must let the markets reallocate capital from…

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