Financial historian John Steele Gordon examines Obama's direction

Mark Twain once said that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” That goes double for economic history, especially in the industrial era when the economy has evolved so quickly from generation to generation. But certain patterns are clear. In modern times, the more that government has controlled the economy, the more bureaucrats, politicians, and intellectuals get to choose winners and losers instead of the marketplace, the less economic growth and innovation there is, the more persistent unemployment is, the slower the improvement in the standard of living.

If you want a vivid example, just compare post-war Britain, which both moved in a socialist direction and became the sick man of the Great Powers, with Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, in which the welfare state was pared back, socialism was reversed, and the forces that had made Britain great were unleashed once again.

It is worrisome in the extreme to realize that Obama’s policies have much more in common with those of Clement Attlee, the prime minister who took over from Winston Churchill when the Second World War ended and put it on the socialist track, than with those of Thatcher, who took charge in England at a time of desperate economic straits. At a time when the United States needs dynamism more than ever, the nation’s voters have chosen to be led by a president whose animating philosophy has led him to adopt policies that will make that dynamism impossible to achieve. If the contradiction proves costly to the American economy, as history suggests, it will exact a profound tribute of its own from Obama’s political future as well.