This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 25, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Herbert Hoover may have failed as a president, but it certainly wasn't for a lack of giant increases in federal

spending.

Steve Horwitz, a professor of economics at St. Lawrence University is author of the recent

Cato paper Herbert Hoover, father of the New Deal. We spoke last week. and Herbert Hoover and whether or not he was actually a Lase Fair Guy or a big

spender or none of the above but you argue that it's important to have this

debate first of all what is the reputation

of Herbert Hoover as president with respect to fiscal policy?

Yeah if the reputation is pretty clear that he was a laissez-faire guy that he stood

around and did nothing while the economy collapsed during

you know post the stock market crash during his presidency and again he gets

invoked today as the sort of archetype of of the do-nothing response to

recession people say we don't want to do what do nothing like Hoover did and end us in the end up in another great

depression so so the reputation is pretty clear the reputation is that he was a

kind of laissez-faire let let the market cure itself kind of guy.

Now does that reputation exist just by virtue of the difference of magnitude between

the kinds of spending programs that FDR was involved in and his own?

What accounts for that?

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question.

I think there's two things.

I think that point's valid.

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