Henry Hazlitt, by the way, author of "Economics in One Lesson"

F. A. Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom:

Most planners who have seriously considered the practical aspects of their task have little doubt that a directed economy must be run on more or less dictatorial lines...

from his chapter bearing the title "Economic Control and Totalitarianism". 

What Hayek said about totalitarianism was reinforced, for me, by what the historian William E. Leuchtenburg wrote about the Great Depression in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal:

It was frequently remarked in later years that Roosevelt saved the country from revolution. Yet the mood of the country during the winter of 1932-33 was not revolutionary. There was less an active demand for change than a disillusionment with parliamentary politics, so often the prelude to totalitarianism in Europe...

Many Americans came to despair of the whole political process, a contempt for Congress, for parties, for democratic institutions...

Many believed that the long era of economic growth in the western world had come to an end...

Many argued that the country could get out of the morass of indecision only by finding a leader and vesting in him dictatorial powers. Some favored an economic supercouncil which would ignore Congress and issue edicts; Henry Hazlitt proposed abandoning Congress for a directorate of twelve men. Others wished to confer on the new president the same arbitrary war powers Woodrow Wilson had been granted. Even businessmen favored granting Roosevelt dictatorial powers when he took office.... "Of course we all realize that dictatorships and even semi-dictatorships in peace time are quite contrary to the spirit of American institutions and all that," remarked Barron's. "And yet -- well, a genial and lighthearted dictator might be a relief from the pompous futility of such a Congress as we have recently had.... So we return repeatedly to the thought that a mild species of dictatorship will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead."

From our vantage point some nine decades after the start of the Great Depression, we know the Depression as an economic problem. Why all the sick chatter about dictatorial power and replacing Congress? And indeed, why all the sick politics of our time?

Like the Great Depression, the problem of our time -- the problem of the last half-century and counting -- is an economic problem. But it's not our only problem. I see two others:

1. Our leaders, and the voters who lead them, act as if they know what must be done to solve the problem. They don't.
   
   
2. Our leaders, unaware of the source of the problem, apply as a solution policies that are similar to those that created the problem to begin with -- policies based on their same flawed ideas.