Barack Delano Obama

"By fixating on the debt and stimulus plans, Obama and Congress are overlooking challenges to the economy from taxes, employment and the entrepreneurial environment. President Roosevelt's great error was to ignore such factors -- and the result was that sickening double dip. . . . Change that is too arbitrary and too frequent petrifies firms, especially before their rules have been tested in the courts. In 1938 Lammot du Pont, head of the eponymous chemical concern, spoke of a 'fog of uncertainty' slowing business and noted in the company's annual report that arbitrary government always slowed business down: 'by land and sea the universal practice under conditions of fog is to slacken speed. . . .'"

-- Amity Shlaes, senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations