Reevaluates the Great Depression’s political economy, finding FDR’s policy to be statist, jejeune, and ultimately ineffective. After an overview of the Coolidge and Hoover administrations’ failure to grasp secular changes, the book describes the baleful effects of seeking to balance the budget, the Smoot-Hawley tariff, and decreased liquidity. The incoming Democrats showed themselves heavily enamored of the social engineering and centralized planning of Soviet Russia. Their conceits (not least FDR’s vanity) were most evident in the Tennessee Valley Authority, Rex Tugwell’s utopian settlements, and the scheme to pack the Supreme Court. FDR used demagoguery (via radio), politicized prosecutions, and taxation to hound the ‘rich’ while rewarding the favored socioeconomic classes that carried him to reelection in 1936. He then caused the 1937 downturn, and blamed capital for staying out of the market. Eventually standards were lowered from the goal of recovery to the cause of improvement. Figures like Wendell Wilkie are woven into the narrative, while the title refers to the contest for popular opinion — was the government to help the ward of the state or the defenseless taxpayer? Persuasive and provocative: the Obama administration is heading the same route with its questionable, phony stimulus.