Obama's counterproductive plan.(THE LAST WORD)(President Barack Obama's economic policy)

On April 10, President Obama emerged from a high-level meeting with his economic team and proclaimed there were "glimmers of hope across the economy." He believed some of those "glimmers" included his stimulus program and infrastructure work that he labeled "progress toward getting the economy back on track." Nevertheless, he was forced to admit that unemployment had hit a 25-year high of 8.5 percent in March, and many Americans are still losing their homes and jobs.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

So, we ask: what more should a president do to deal with this serious economic downturn? Obama didn't provide a specific answer but, speaking in generalities, he offered, "We've still got a lot of work to do." So, without doubt, the nation can expect more of what he has already done--more federal spending, more regulation, more inflation, and, in short, more of precisely what history confirms government should not do to deal with recession's scourge. History tells us over and over again that government action of the kind already taken and being planned will make matters worse.

Economist and historian Dr. Thomas Woods points out--and he isn't alone--that getting out of a recession/depression can be accomplished if government gets out of the way. In other words, what President Obama and his team should do is nothing except abolish some government agencies. In Meltdown, his current bestseller, Woods recounts how our nation dug itself out of a very severe downturn immediately after World War I. "By the middle of 1920," he reports, "conditions were worse than they would be in 1930 after the first year of the Great Depression." Instead of dealing with the crisis with public works projects, Federal Reserve-created inflation, deficit spending for stimulus schemes, etc., the government and the Federal Reserve essentially did nothing during that period, and the nation recovered in less than two years.

The way our nation dealt with the 1920-1921 depression isn't discussed by today's economists, at least the vast majority who are captives to Keynesian socialist economics. There are two reasons why they ignore what happened close to 100 years ago: a) the problem was so short-lived, and b) it was solved, not by government, but by government standing aside and allowing the people to dig the nation out of the hole. The lesson is clear, even if most economists fail to mention it.

In his book, Woods shows that President Hoover initiated the completely opposite response at the outset of the Great Depression, an array of government actions that were ...