Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Are conservatives going to allow liberals to rewrite history?

The Economic History Lessons We Never Learned - Stephen Moore/Heritage

Are conservatives going to allow liberals to rewrite the history of the Great Recession, just as they so successfully did in writing the fictitious account of the Great Depression, which now appears in almost every American history text?

The central message of former Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in his new book “Stress Test,” is that the bank bailouts and the Obama stimulus plan saved us from a second Great Depression. President Obama recites that same line in nearly every speech he delivers.

This is what we call a counterfactual – what might have happened if we hadn’t done what we did. The left loves counterfactuals, because - like “climate change” – they are impossible to refute. No one can say for certain what would have happened in some parallel universe.

But getting the story right on this episode of history is a critical issue for American economic policy going forward. We let the left write the history books on the Great Depression and it was an Aesops Fable....