Another brilliant letter from Boudreaux...though I'm sure even Don would admit it isn't that hard to be brilliant when quoting Mencken.

Editor, The Wall Street Journal
200 Liberty Street
New York, NY 10281

To the Editor:

Ed Glaeser wisely argues that it's a bad deal to copy ideas from the New Deal - including that of subsidizing mortgage debt ("The GOP Has a Dumb Mortgage Idea," Feb. 5). As one of the most astute Americans ever to live, H.L. Mencken, said about the New Deal, "It is a puerile amalgam of exploded imbecilities, many of them in flat contradiction of the rest." And among the imbecilities that Mencken highlighted was the New Deal proposal "to lift the burden of debt by encouraging fools to incur more debt."*

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* H.L. Mencken, On Politics : A Carnival of Buncombe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1996 [1956]), p. 311.