Property and property rights, which have suffered during the economic meltdown, will be key factors in the nation's recovery.

That's the assessment of Amity Shlaes, author of "The Forgotten Man," which examines governmental policies during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Shlaes was a featured speaker at a Wyoming Heritage Foundation event that concluded in Casper on Friday.

Leading up to the current recession, Shlaes said people misunderstood what home ownership entails and that owning property is a "great good, but not an entitlement."

Likening economic policy to the board game Monopoly, Shlaes said the bank, or the federal government, doesn't have to be controlled by one political party or another. It just has to be "not too bad" to inspire a measure of confidence in the economy. And property will be an important factor if business people are expected to play the game.

During the Great Depression, Shlaes said government frequently operated from a sense of arrogance at the top, forgetting microeconomics, crowding out private sector innovations and undermining property rights.

While some policies of President Franklin Roosevelt's administration were helpful, others were counterproductive. The aim of the National Recovery Administration, for example, was to ensure that the entire industrial economy was supervised.

Shlaes sees some parallels to the Obama Administration -- for example, because ideas such as cap-and-trade and health-care reform come from "important minds," there's a belief that's sufficient to make them work.

There also has been a tendency to exploit the crisis to address presumed problems that are unrelated, Shlaes added.

During the Great Depression, leaders adopted a posture that "government was good, and more government was better," she said, but that belief often hindered economic growth.

Shlaes is a syndicated columnist for Bloomberg, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

Business Editor Tom Mast can be reached at tom.mast@trib.com, or call 307-266-0574. Or check out his "Two Bits Worth" blog at tribtown.trib.com/TomMast/blog