The New Deal Provides No Support for Obama's Big Govt. Plan

From the Independent Institute: 

President-elect Barack Obama is looking to FDR as a model in battling the recession. Yet, as Independent Institute Senior Fellow and historian Robert Higgs has shown, FDR’s policies never ended the Depression—which in fact lasted until 1945—and thus the New Deal should only be seen as a foolish model for extending economic malaise for more than a decade. Higgs’s analysis of the bailouts and other economic troubles has been cited by everyone from the Christian Science Monitor to John Stossel to the New York Times to Rush Limbaugh. 

Also, even if the New Deal in a small way helped boost the U.S. economy, that's little evidence the help today would outweight its liabilities. Then, the U.S. was hegemonic. Today, China and India are competing with us, and winning. We can't afford to spend huge percentages of GDP on schemes that the private sector deemed unprofitable. That is likely to accelerate the U.S.'s decline. 

It's Getting Crazier: Now $8.5 TRILLION in bailouts and handouts (plus more in boondoggles)

The Los Angeles Times estimates that the proposed bailouts and handouts will cost $8.5 TRILLION. That is fully half of this year's U.S. economic output! 

And that's not even counting the big-spender states and municipalities planning to join the bailout conga line! Nor does it count the hundreds of billions in alternative energy and education boondoggles (See below.)

We're going to take that inconceivably large amount of money from the good people who are productive enough to pay taxes to give to the businesses and people who managed themselves into or near bankruptcy? To spend on Sloppy Thousandths: the alternative energy schemes that no private company felt worthy to invest in? To spend yet more on education despite study after study demonstrating that spending more, especially on Obama's pet liberal ideas, does not yield more results?

Japan tried the strategy of massive government bailouts, handouts, and boondoggles (prettied up with the word "stimulus") in the '90s and it failed.  

And that is supposed to be the spending that will replace our house-of-cards economy with a sturdy one? That will increase the U.S's ability to survive against competition from China, India, etc.?  The government bailout/handout/boondoggle spending approach is more likely to drive the U.S. into a depression of unprecedentedly painful proportions. 

Why are free-market voices not being heard here?