The conservative economist in California wonders: where is it?: "Bill Clinton loudly proclaimed to the delegates to the Democratic National Convention that no president could have gotten us out of the recession in just one term. But history shows that the economy rebounded out of a worse unemployment situation in just two years under [Warren G.] Harding, who simply let the market revive on its own, as it had done before, time and time again for more than a century."
He continues his commentary: "Something similar happened under Ronald Reagan. Unemployment peaked at 9.7 percent early in the Reagan administration. Like Harding and earlier presidents, Reagan did nothing [as opposed to massive government intervention], despite outraged outcries in the media. The economy once again revived on its own. Three years later, unemployment was down to 7.2 percent -- and it kept on falling, as the country experienced twenty years of economic growth with low inflation and low unemployment."
More commentary from Mr. Sowell, about the Obama Economy: "The Obama party line is that all the bad things are due to what he inherited from Bush, and the few signs of recovery are due to Obama's policies beginning to pay off. But, if the economy has been rebounding on its own for more than 150 years, the question is why it has been so slow to recover under the Obama administration. The endless proliferation of anti-business interventions by government, and the sight of more of the same coming over the horizon from Barack Obama's appointees in the federal bureaucracies, creates the one thing that has long stifled economic activity in countries around the world -- uncertainty about what the rules of the game are, and the unpredictability of how specifically those rules will continue to change in a hostile political environment."
Thomas Sowell: "Obama Has An Economic Plan?"
