The Wall Street Journal has published an excellent editorial today outlining exactly how the New Deal prolonged and worsened the Great Depression. Authors Cole and Ohanian write clearly and concisely about how each step that the government took deepened the mire of the market just when it should have, left to its own devices, corrected itself.

The main lesson we have learned from the New Deal is that wholesale government intervention can -- and does -- deliver the most unintended of consequences. This was true in the 1930s, when artificially high wages and prices kept us depressed for more than a decade, it was true in the 1970s when price controls were used to combat inflation but just produced shortages. It is true today, when poorly designed regulation produced a banking system that took on too much risk.