Over on NRO today you’ll find a piece by Conrad Black praising FDR as a great conservative and endeavoring to rescue the New Deal president from those he calls Right revisionists.

One specific point really irks me — Black’s notion that the GI Bill created the American middle class. There was an American middle class prior to the GI Bill, but relatively few of its members had gone to college. They learned what they needed to know for their businesses and professions other than in classrooms. My grandfather was a good example. (And he disliked FDR intensely for his numerous attacks on freedom, such as confiscating gold.)

I am certain that others will dismember the rest of the article, for Black is absolutely mistaken in thinking that FDR’s presidency (particularly the first two terms) was anything less than catastrophic. As I see it, the main flaw in Black’s argument is that he ignores the enormous degree to which FDR politicized the country. The greater the extent to which a nation’s decisions are made through politics, the less free and prosperous it becomes. A politicized economy wastes resources on programs and projects that appeal to politicians, and the salient fact about politicians is that they’re dealing with other people’s money. They have short time horizons and rarely suffer any adverse consequences from being wrong. A politicized nation devotes more and more resources to lobbying and political infighting, less and less to production. A politicized nation is apt to destroy capital with punitive taxes, as politicians find it expedient to win votes by appealing to envy.

If Roosevelt had taken the approach Harding did — non-interventionism and budget and tax cutting — the nation would have recovered much faster and not been permanently saddled with a vast array of authoritarian, meddlesome, and wasteful government programs.