Gerald Ford sermonized to Americans on inflation. Franklin Roosevelt called executives ingrates. Herbert Hoover, whom Obama most resembles currently, brow beat business into raising wages.
But like his predecessors, Obama is sure to discover that presidential finger wagging isn't a good idea -- for himself or for the economy he's aiming to buttress.
The first problem is that presidents often have it wrong.
Many still grimace when they remember Ford's campaign to "Whip Inflation Now." Inflation was definitely a problem in the 1970s, when Ford was president. But he was confusing monetary policy with microeconomics when he insisted that consumers could stop inflation by shopping for bargains.
Bewildered businesses tried to take advantage of the Ford campaign to attract customers even as they pondered presidential logic. The New York Times reported on a new McDonald's radio ad campaign: A father buys his son a 50-cent bargain meal, then asks him how he likes fighting inflation. Son: "It tastes good." The real problem lay, however, with the amount of money in circulation, not prices businesses set. And that was the responsibility of the man over at the Federal Reserve, Chairman Arthur Burns.
Hoover also got it wrong when he urged businesses to keep wages high during the 1929 recession. The businesses complied, but they hired commensurately fewer workers, and unemployment climbed.
The wag of the presidential finger can also make business uncertain. And a business that is anxious makes the wrong move, or freezes.
Roosevelt's tender mercies toward businesses so terrified companies that they postponed both hiring and investment. Roosevelt grew yet more cross. Business went on what was called "capital strike," which I detailed in my recent Bloomberg column and my book on the Great Depression, "The Forgotten Man."
The net of this New Deal spatting was that instead of recovery, the economy plummeted again, and America experienced the infamous "Depression within the Depression" of 1938.
In Obama's case, he's scolding banks for not lending more. While he was at it, the president got in an extra dig: Banks had been rescued from a crisis that was "largely of their own making," Obama said.
Banks and financial institutions surely deserved the criticism. The crisis was indeed due in part to their own foolish leveraging. But Obama's assumption that the private sector needs more guarantees and babysitting is fundamentally flawed. A lecture that said "nobody is too big to fail next time" would make more sense than one that says banks have to lend, no matter what.
Presidential scolding is similar to parental scolding: It's never the best option.
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Amity Shlaes is a Bloomberg columnist and senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations.
