A warning from Paul Rubin:

Until now, this election has been fought on the margins, over marginal issues. But it is important to understand how much a presidential candidate wants to move the needle on taxes, trade and other issues. Usually there isn’t a chance for wholesale change. Now, however, it appears that this election will make more than a marginal difference. It might fundamentally change America.

Unlike FDR, Mr. Obama will not have to create the mechanisms government uses to interfere with the economy before imposing his policies. FDR had to get the Supreme Court to overturn a century’s worth of precedents limiting the power of government before he could use the Constitution’s commerce clause, among other things, to increase government control of the economy. Mr. Obama will have no such problem.

FDR also had to create agencies to implement regulations. Today, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board (both created in the 1930s) as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and others created later are in place. Increasing their power will be easier than creating them from scratch.

Even before the current crisis, there was a great demand for increased government regulation to limit global warming. That gives the next president a ready-made box in which to place more regulation, and a legion of supports eager for it.

But if the coming wave of new regulation from an Obama administration is harmful to the economy, Mr. Obama will take a page from FDR’s playbook. He’ll blame Republicans for having caused the market crash in the first place, and so escape blame for the consequences of his policies. It worked for FDR and, so far in this campaign, blaming Republicans and George W. Bush has worked for Mr. Obama.

I hope we don’t have to end the next government-caused depression the way we ended the last one.

Ezra Levant could use some financial support in his new battle with the Canadian Human Wrongs Commission:

…here’s where Dagenais becomes a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the CHRC and its censorship fetish: she blacked out portions of my defence before passing it on to the commissioners. Seriously — she censored what I wrote in my own defence, before she passed it along to the people who will sit in judgment of me. She’s only allowing me to say things in my defence that she approves in advance. Look at the version of my letter she’s passing on: several of my arguments are blacked out.

It’s too bad that Harper couldn’t get a clear majority. I hope that nonetheless he’ll be more confident in doing something about this ongoing travesty of justice. But I fear that with an Obama/Reid/Pelosi administration, this assault on freedom of expression will migrate south. Certainly the behavior of the Obama campaign has done nothing to assuage my fears.