Happy inauguration day! Today we begin with this little known factoid: For the first 143 years of the American Republic, presidents were inaugurated on March 4, the only day of the year that is also a command.

The date was moved up to Jan. 20 in 1932 when the activist president Franklin Delano Roosevelt couldn’t wait to wring his hands around the neck of the US economy. Roosevelt set in motion 78 years of what the economist Friedrich von Hayek called the “fatal conceit” – the arrogant belief that anyone could know enough at any one time to plan an economy.