MEGAN MCARDLE: Liberals Shouldn’t Defend FDR’s Attacks On The Court. “Maybe you like precious schoolchildren lisping loyalty oaths to government programs more than I do. But even so, not this program. The NIRA was based on a lunatic confusion of cause with effect. President Roosevelt had noticed, along with everyone else, that prices were falling and people were being thrown out of work. So he decided that if businesses would just stop lowering those darn prices, everything would be okay. . . . This is like thinking that the way to deal with your drinking problem is to just stop vomiting and blacking out so much. Prices were falling because the banking system had collapsed, which was sucking the money out of the economy like a gigantic national vacuum. Even if the cartels managed to keep prices from falling, people still weren’t going to have enough money to buy the goods they wanted, because their savings accounts were shut down and they couldn’t roll their loans over, and neither could the people who bought their merchandise or wrote their paychecks. With too little money in circulation, fixing prices artificially high would just mean that even more people would be going without necessities. . . . I’m not trying to get liberals to concede that 80 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence were all a hideous mistake. But thinking that the healthcare law should be allowed to stand does not require romanticizing FDR’s conflict with the court, which mostly used bad methods to defend bad laws.”