Harry Truman, free marketeer?

Is it possible he was the most deregulatory President of his century?  John Nye writes:

…Harry Truman left office in 1953 a very unpopular man.  Almost no one at the time gave him credit for overseeing a period of rapid recovery that was much broader and more impressive than anything that happened under Roosevelt's tenure — and this at a time when most economists predicted a deep postwar recession.  He did this while shrinking the government and dismantling wartime regulation at a rate Ronald Reagan could only have dreamed of.  He smoothly pulled us back from a regime of wage and price controls that could have easily been allowed to linger…Thanks to Truman we were once again moving in the direction of a competitive, open-access market economy…Yet Truman's stellar reputation today owes nothing to his economic achievements, which most of those who today praise his foreign policy acumen know nothing about.

That's from the Sept./Oct. issue of The American Interest and the article is entitled The Real New Deal (gated).

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