Did FDR's policies help us get out of the Great Depression?

[Old Rocks]

Now this is all prepatory to attacking whatever policies that Obama pushes through to deal with the Second Great Republican Depression. Since the ideologues here are going to avoid, at all costs, discussing the policies that brought about both the first and second great depressions, the best they can do is thow dirt at the man that guided this nation when we were in one of the worst periods of of this nations history. Now we have another man that shows signs of being a great leader. In contrast to the last eight years of abysmal failure in all spheres by their own boy, disowned now, of course. And they would rather see the nation fail, than Obama succeed.

 

[Annie]

Now this is all prepatory to attacking whatever policies that Obama pushes through to deal with the Second Great Republican Depression. Since the ideologues here are going to avoid, at all costs, discussing the policies that brought about both the first and second great depressions, the best they can do is thow dirt at the man that guided this nation when we were in one of the worst periods of of this nations history. Now we have another man that shows signs of being a great leader. In contrast to the last eight years of abysmal failure in all spheres by their own boy, disowned now, of course. And they would rather see the nation fail, than Obama succeed.

What has Obama done, other than win this election, that leads you to say he 'shows signs of being a great leader?'

 

[BaronVonBigmeat]

Toro, for a guy who used to have a sig quoting Barry Goldwater, you sure do a lot of white-knighting for socialism.

And besides which, the Nobel Prize doesn't mean a whole lot. They gave the nobel prize to Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat, for chrissakes. On top of that, the Nobel prize in economics isn't even a real nobel prize--it's a prize awarded by (surprise surprise) the central bank of Sweden, "in memory of Alfred Nobel".

 

[Old Rocks]

Well, Baron, now that Bush has turned to socialism to try to avert the result of the Republican policies of the last 40 years, I guess it is OK for the rest of us to be socialists.

 

[BaronVonBigmeat]

At this writing, the Federal Reserve has lowered the short term U.S. interest rate to effectively 0%, and it appears to be in the process of tripling the U.S. money supply over a relatively short period. This would be a good time for an overall view of what is happening in the economy and what you can expect in the near future.

The crucial fact to understand is that on March 9, 1933 the (commercial) bankers received the privilege (from the new Democratic administration of F.D.R.) to create money out of nothing. This is a bit of a simplification, but it is essentially accurate, and it is from this fact that everything else about our economy follows.

Prior to this time, bankers had a special privilege to create money (to a limited extent). The 17th century goldsmiths took in deposits of hard money (such as gold or silver) and issued paper receipts promising to give the bearer (of the receipt) his hard money on demand. This promise made the receipts for money just as good as money themselves. The goldsmiths then became bankers but not the way you think. Instead of paying people interest (like a savings banker) to get deposits, they simply printed up more paper receipts (without any gold or silver to back them) and lent these paper receipts (bank notes) out as money. A typical goldsmith/banker of the period might have 100 dollars (or British pounds) in gold/silver for every 300 dollars in bank notes. Since most people did not cash in their bank notes for hard money, they never discovered the bankers’ trick.

The next step in the process was the creation of a central bank. A central bank is a large bank in the business of lending to the government. The premier central bank is the Bank of England, founded in 1694, and most central banks are imitations of the Bank of England. If a small banker got into trouble by issuing too many bank notes (in excess of his gold and silver), the central bank would come in and lend it gold/silver to tide it over the crisis. This is the kind of central bank created by Alexander Hamilton in 1791.

Hamilton’s central bank provoked a giant political battle in the U.S.. Jefferson saw that a central bank was just an institution to help the bankers (and their loan customers and associated vested interests) to get richer without doing any useful work. He led a political battle to abolish the central bank, and this was finally accomplished (after his death) by Andrew Jackson, who vetoed the charter renewal of the bank in 1832. Over the remainder of the 19th century, America, with no central bank, became the most productive economy in the world.

Woodrow Wilson brought back the central bank, under the name Federal Reserve System. He did it as a favor to J.P. Morgan for helping him to defeat the Republicans in 1912. (Morgan split the Republican vote by backing Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party.) Both Morgan and Wilson pretended to be enemies, and this fraud remains in the history books to this day. However, the fatal step, which is now destroying the American economy, was taken by F.D.R., who gave the privilege to create money out of nothing to the Federal Reserve. Prior to March 9, 1933, the bankers had the privilege to stretch the money supply as a multiple of their gold. But after 1933, the bankers (in conjunction with the Federal Reserve) had the ability to simply create money out of nothing. This they have done in spades. The U.S. money supply in March 1933 was $20 billion. It is now almost $1.6 trillion. Dallas Fed chief Fisher has announced an intention to increase it to approximately $4.2 trillion (in about 1-2 years time).

You have undoubtedly heard the Federal Reserve described as the nation’s “inflation” fighter. This is an outright lie. If you research wholesale prices in U.S. history and assign the value of 100 to the reading for the year 1793 (during the Washington Administration), you find that prices were also 100 just prior to the Civil War. They were at 100 again in 1879. And they were at 100 again in early 1914. Finally, U.S. prices were at 100 in early 1933, just before F.D.R. abolished the gold standard and gave the bankers the privilege to create money.

So before the Fed was created (1914) and before it received the money creation power (1933), there was no “inflation.” Prices did have their ups and downs, but after 140 years they came out the same. Basic economic goods, such as a bale of cotton, a pound of butter, a ton of iron ore or a pound of copper had the same price in 1933 as they had had in 1793. So through these 140 years, for most of which the nation had no “inflation” fighter, it had no “inflation.”

Imagine that a small town has no fire department. It doesn’t need one because it has no fires. But nevertheless the town council is duped into creating a fire fighting department. As soon as the fire fighters are organized and given their brand new equipment, fires start to break out all over the place. Wouldn’t it be reasonable for the people of that town to get suspicious?

Well, that is what happened with the Fed. As soon as the Fed was given the power to create money, it started to do so in spades, and the increase in money caused an increase in prices. Today, by official estimate, the U.S. price level has multiplied by a factor of 17 since 1933. (This official estimate is badly wrong, however, since the Government took housing prices out of the Consumer Price Index and substituted rents. Since housing prices rose sharply from 1997-2007 and rents lagged far behind, the Government’s rental version seriously understates how far prices have risen.)

Given that the bankers now had the power to create money, they moved to consolidate their privilege. They found an obscure school of economists (lead by two Wall Streeters named William Trufant Foster and Waddill Catchings). These people argued that creating money out of nothing was the “road to plenty” for a society. Foster and Catchings themselves never caught on because they were too obviously conservative and on the side of the rich. John Maynard Keynes saw this and rephrased their theory adding cue words and mathematical mumbo-jumbo to make it appear progressive, scientific and in sympathy with the poor. A group of New York bankers then literally bribed several of the leading colleges in America to accept Keynesian (or Foster and Catchings) economists on their staff. John Kenneth Galbraith’s Chair at Harvard, paid for by the Manhattan Bank (now J.P. Morgan Chase), is a good example.

With this advantage, Keynesian economists were infiltrated into all the major colleges in the country; the smaller institutions rushed to imitate the more prestigious ones. The result is that almost all economics taught in modern American colleges is crackpot and is devoted to serving the interests of bankers.

Intelligent students who take an economics course today are offended by the massive irrationality. They usually decide, “I guess I just don’t understand economics.” And they drop out. The stupid students parrot what their professor says. These people are given impressive titles and certificates to certify that they understand economics. Then they are hired for various jobs as economists around the country. One of them may write a column for your local paper, or weekly news magazine. Another may give the economic news on the TV channel you watch. Others of them pop up from time to time as “experts” to comment on various events of the day.

If you believe this kind of information, then your economic decisions will be a disaster. They were telling you to sell stocks in 1982. They were telling you to buy stocks in 2000. They vilified the gold bugs of the 1970s in the early part of the decade and never had the intellectual honesty to apologize late in the decade. This, by the way, is a general principle. If you govern your life by obedience to authority rather than the judgement of your own mind, you are going to make mistakes at every turn. The main reason that a person seeks the appearance of authority is because he wants to impress you, and he does not want to do the hard work of getting the truth. There is nothing wrong with taking the advice of an expert in an area where your knowledge is incomplete, but you must have definite evidence that the alleged expert is an expert in fact. You may not know how the expert mechanic fixes your car, but the judgement of your own mind can certify that in fact he has fixed it.

In the same way, when the predictions of the gold bugs of the 1970s came true over the course of the decade, this proved that they were the true economic experts and that the establishment, the people with all the titles, were crackpots. We have all heard the story of Galileo’s experiment in dropping the two weights, one heavy and one light, from the leaning tower of Pisa. What if that story ended with the establishment physicists refusing to admit what Galileo had proved and pretending that it had never happened? Confronted with the exact same situation in 1979, the establishment economists said, “The public is so stupid that, if we merely pretend that this all never happened, they will not get wise.” In short, these people are not scientists. They are not dedicated to truth. They are a group of con artists and liars. But if this is the case, then what is their motive?

The New Deal preached the philosophy of “rob from the rich to give to the poor.” And it followed this philosophy in tax policy. There then arose a counter party, called conservatives, who opposed robbery and adopted a position of sympathy for the rich. However, the New Deal (and subsequent Democratic Administrations) intended their tax policy for show. Using monetary policy they robbed from the poor and gave to the rich. This was done in two ways.

1. The institution of retirement is based on the ability to receive interest. Retirement began in Britain and America after the right to receive interest on one’s savings was legalized in the 1780s (due to Jeremy Bentham and Noah Webster). Americans would save a portion of their income each year and invest it at the standard interest rate of the time, which was about 5% and let their money accumulate. Money invested in this way over a 49 year working lifetime (16-65) multiplies (according to compound interest) by a little over 4 times. Thus an average American who saves (to use modern numbers) 15% of his income of $30,000, or $4,500 per year, does not wind up with $220,500 (which is 49 x $4,500). He winds up with over 4 times as much, or almost $900,000. The difference between having $900,000 and $220,000 is that you can invest the former figure at 5% interest and support a nice retirement, but you cannot do this with the latter. Retirement became an institution in America and Britain over the course of the 19th century.

The New Deal reduced the real interest rate to 0%. That is, the degree to which your money grew at a normal bank interest rate was offset by the depreciation of the currency. Your money grew in nominal terms but not in buying power. Thus the New Deal and its successors have been robbing from the savers and retired population for 2 generations. These people only retired by living off capital, and the capital supply of the nation is rapidly being depleted.

2. It was well known in the 19th century that, when prices rose, wages did not rise as rapidly, and the real buying power of wages fell. Keynes knew this, but modern followers of Keynes maintain an absolute wall of silence on this point. I used this fact to predict in my first book, The Paper Aristocracy, that real wages in America would decline. Taking the first generation (30 years) from the abolition of the tie to gold in 1971 (i.e., the period 1972-2002), we find a drop in real wages of 18%. This is the first generation in American history to be poorer than its fathers.

The wealth taken from the retired and from the wage earner is given (by Keynesian policies) to the paper aristocracy. This consists of the bankers, their big loan customers and various associated vested interests (such as Wall Street). When the Fed creates money, it goes into the banks, and they profit by making more loans (hence a loan, or credit, expansion). To attract loan customers, banks lower the rate of interest. Since banks always like to lend to the rich (because they like to get paid back), these large borrowers benefit from a low rate of interest. They also benefit because their debts are paid off in depreciated currency. If you put $100,000 down and borrow $2,000,000 to buy an apartment complex for $2,100,000, then over a period when average prices double (such as 1980-1999) the complex goes to $4,200,000. You then sell the complex and pay off your loan of $2,000,000. You have $2,200,000 profit on an initial investment of $100,000. This is how Donald Trump gets rich. Since there are a small group of people getting very rich, it takes a lot of people getting poor to balance this off. (The overall system is non-productive.)

So the New Deal robbed from the rich in theory, but it robbed from the poor to give to the rich in practice. And the working man did not get wise for 75 years. However, in 2008 there was a change. In 2008, the Democrats disregarded their disguise. When they supported the Wall Street bailout in October 2008, they openly admitted that they were robbing from the poor to give to the rich. Hopefully, the American working man will now realize that he is a victim and will turn against the system at the polls.

The current economic “crisis” was invented by Henry Paulson. The rise in interest rates of 2004-06 was the right policy for the country (a small step in the right direction), but it was a disaster for Goldman Sachs and for the world in which Paulson lived. When he saw his friends facing bankruptcy he went berserk and started to scream “financial crisis.” President Bush, who knows nothing about economics, took his word and declared a crisis. The New York Times, despite their constant criticism that President Bush was stupid, took his word and declared, “FINANCIAL CRISIS.” At first, this has a self-confirming effect. The other papers in the country follow the Times like sheep. Millions of people read that we are in crisis, and they rush to sell their stocks. Everyone then points to the stock market decline to “prove” that we are in fact in crisis. Businesses cut back on their advertisements; thus there is a decline in retail sales. These effects are short term and will be over in a few months. Gold bottomed Oct. 24. It is likely that the stock market bottomed Nov. 20-21 and is now on its way up. Retail sales will rebound, and unemployment will come back down. The whole crisis is an illusion in the mind of Henry Paulson.

But to fight this non-existent crisis, Ben (Don Quixote) Bernanke has lowered nominal interest rates to 0. He is in the process of tripling the U.S. money supply. His Keynesian teachers have taught him that printing money is the road to plenty and makes a society rich. He is riding out to save the economy. (But to him the economy is the banks and the big corporations, not the working people of the country.) The tripling of the money supply should be well under way by year-end 2009, and it should take about 2 years more to triple prices. The working man will find that the prices he has to pay have tripled, but his wages have fallen far short of that. The retired community will be devastated.

The idea that a nation can get rich by spending is on the lunatic fringe, and no nation has ever gotten rich that way. In the 19th century, America and Britain got rich by saving. And the nations which succeeded in the 20th century did so by imitating these two. Every nation which has gone the paper money route has destroyed its economy. Ben Bernanke is a Don Quixote type who sees dragons that are not there. He is out to destroy the American economy. It is our job to stop him.

The Gold Bug

 

[mash107]

Well, Baron, now that Bush has turned to socialism to try to avert the result of the Republican policies of the last 40 years, I guess it is OK for the rest of us to be socialists.

And look where that landed us? The worst economic depression in 60 years. Hardly a rolemodel. Obama = Bush. They're both follow Keynes and they're both deadly to the economy.

Because it is conservative ideologues such as yourself that are trying to re-write history. Someone who dismisses out of hand a Nobel prize winner such as Paul Krugman because he is Paul Krugman - as you just did - might play well with the Anne Coulter crowd, but serious people looking for answers rather than checking ideological boxes don't.

And again, just look at what the Republican leaders are doing right now - they are following the lead of FDR and Keynes. They realize that quaint ideology is nice in academia and on message boards, but when the chips are down and when it really matters, they act in the best way they see fit.

You are absolutely correct. Republicans are borrow & spend warhawks, and not hardly "conservative" by any means. Doesn't make Krugman any less of an idiot and Keynesian policies any less deadly to our economic well-being. It diverts capital away from creating productive jobs, which can't be physically seen, but judging the state of the economy, it's definitely happened! And that capital gets wasted in wars, "infrastructure" projects, and other counterproductive areas. Listen to Thomas Woods interview here : awr.dissentradio.com/08_12_18_woods.mp3 and draw your own conclusion.

 

[xsited1]

Because it is conservative ideologues such as yourself that are trying to re-write history. Someone who dismisses out of hand a Nobel prize winner such as Paul Krugman because he is Paul Krugman - as you just did - might play well with the Anne Coulter crowd, but serious people looking for answers rather than checking ideological boxes don't.

And again, just look at what the Republican leaders are doing right now - they are following the lead of FDR and Keynes. They realize that quaint ideology is nice in academia and on message boards, but when the chips are down and when it really matters, they act in the best way they see fit.

Please! You're calling me a conservative when I am not. You talk about Republicans, yet I have nothing in common with them. You talk about people like Bush when I never once supported or voted for the man. You talk about Ann Coulter and somehow think I like her. You're just a robot with liberal programming. Your posts are great comic relief, but you really should seek help. It's like you're a member of a cult, but you don't believe it. It makes me wonder how many black helicopters you've seen lately. Funny, but sad.

 

[BaronVonBigmeat]

I'm not. Revisionist history is so awesome.

Next we'll be hearing that he bungled WW2.

Indeed, he did.

Please read [ame=http://www.amazon.com/New-Dealers-War-Within-World/dp/0465024653/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230181712&sr=8-1]The New Dealer's War[/ame] for more info. Or for a more mainstream and liberal view, look at the work of [ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Beard#Non-interventionist_foreign_policy]Charles Beard[/ame]. Actually there was a program on the History Channel which covered this.

Also to the conservatives who think WWII got us out of the depression: We've spent a ton of money on our current war--where has it gotten us? Or the Vietnam war--we should have been just peachy during the 70's. War doesn't create prosperity! It is a regrettable necessity sometimes, but let's not kid ourselves--it is just another form of socialism. If war could end depressions, then we could just hire a million people to build a city, and then have our military blow it up. This is no different than having a "socialist" program where a million men dig holes in the dirt, and another million men fill it up the next day. Yes, they are employed, but they are not producing anything useful.

 

[garyd]

Okay first off if you track, the ups and downs of the great Depression you find that every time the New Dealers got their way the economy got worse when they were held at bay by the Supreme Court it began to recover.

2nd the president isn't in charge of the economy. The congress is, as it is they who hold the purse strings. One or both houses of the congress of the United States has been held by the Democrats for all but four of the last 70 years. Neither Nixon, Ford or GHW Bush were arguably conservative and the only conservative thing Bush did was the tax cuts.

 

[xsited1]

Unregulated Capitalism causes a depression. It did back in the 1930's and it has now.

Another revisionist history graduate!

America has laws. That's the regulation. When you talk about crony capitalism, that's breaking the law.

 

[Toro]

You are absolutely correct. Republicans are borrow & spend warhawks, and not hardly "conservative" by any means. Doesn't make Krugman any less of an idiot

You lost me right there.

A man who won the Bates medal and the Nobel prize in economics is certainly not an "idiot."

I certainly do not agree with everything Krugman believes or writes but you discredit yourself by referring to a man who is amongst the most highly acclaimed on the planet as an "idiot," which merely marginalizes your own argument.

 

[editec]

Because it is conservative ideologues such as yourself that are trying to re-write history. Someone who dismisses out of hand a Nobel prize winner such as Paul Krugman because he is Paul Krugman - as you just did - might play well with the Anne Coulter crowd, but serious people looking for answers rather than checking ideological boxes don't.

And again, just look at what the Republican leaders are doing right now - they are following the lead of FDR and Keynes. They realize that quaint ideology is nice in academia and on message boards, but when the chips are down and when it really matters, they act in the best way they see fit.

I appluade you efforts to wake up these faith based Misesian idealogues, but they simply do not want to believe it.

Now at lot of us who are old enough know plenty of people who lived through the depression, who worked in CCC or WPA projects and who can tell us stories of how FDR's actions saved them and their families from homelssness and starvation.

These people do not care about that.

They don't care what the world's most emminent economists are saying either.

They don't care to acknowledge the recent history about why we're in this mess, either.

They are idealogues and facts simple do NOT matter.

Any fact you can bring them that refutes their idealogical belief system will be, according to them, a lie.

Nothing short of THEM going broke and having to cope with what's happening now is going to wake them up.

Lucky them!

 

[Toro]

Toro, for a guy who used to have a sig quoting Barry Goldwater, you sure do a lot of white-knighting for socialism.

I have books by Ludwig von Mises on my shelf and I have books by Keynes. I have studied everyone from Smith to Say to Bastiat to Marshall to Marx to Keynes to Friedman. My teenage years were spent reading Ayn Rand. Most of my books are libertarian. But I work in a profession where what matters are stark results, not theory or dogma. What matters to me is empiricism, what works, not ideology. Ideas are great but I am wary of ideologues because ideologues frame the world based on their ideas and look at the world through their ideological framework first. They don't look at the world as it is. Ideologues look at it backwards, trying to fit the world as they see it into their ideological framework. They keep themselves in an intellectual box. In my world, staying in a box can mean you are unemployed tomorrow because the world doesn't give a rat's ass what I believe. The world is what it is, and I have to figure out the world as it is, not as I want it to be. Ideologues look at the world as they want it to be.

And besides which, the Nobel Prize doesn't mean a whole lot. They gave the nobel prize to Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat, for chrissakes. On top of that, the Nobel prize in economics isn't even a real nobel prize--it's a prize awarded by (surprise surprise) the central bank of Sweden, "in memory of Alfred Nobel".

You could say the same thing about Robert Merton and other disciples of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which have seen their world come crashing down over the past few months. But I'm not going to denigrate the work of guys like Myron Scholes and dismiss out of hand everything they believe in as xsited1 does above, even though the assumptions underpinning their theories look like nothing I see every day in the markets. And I roll my eyes when the economists upstairs tell me how the markets I eat, sleep and breathe are supposed to work. It is irrelevant that Arafat won the Nobel peace prize or that the prize in economics wasn't an original Nobel prize. (Economics didn't even exist as a profession when Alfred Nobel left his award.) The Nobel Prize winners in economics are all highly acclaimed academics and individuals who have reached the highest level of their chosen profession. The Nobel is merely a manifestation of this fact.

 

[Modbert]

Another revisionist history graduate!

America has laws. That's the regulation. When you talk about crony capitalism, that's breaking the law.

No, America did not have the laws in place before Enron happened and the current financial crisis for which it applies to.

Regulation my ass. The form for companies to apply for a bailout is two pages long, one page of which is bank contact information. Christsakes, my college applications were longer.

The fed currently refuses to disclose who are the recipients of over $2 trillion dollars.

Predatory lending and loans in which there was no regulation for.

No regulation for Credit Card companies which can jack up your rates by outrageous amounts if you're late for one payment. (Even though most fail to know that plenty of companies just withhold the checks until it's past the due date or simply rip them up so they can bash you with high prices).

Or how about the banks who told people they COULD take out $400,000 in loans for a home,etc with giving the people delusions that they can one day pay them back when they cannot. This is one of the reasons of why we are where we currently are.

If you truly believe that America has the current laws in place to regulate Wall Street from Pure Capitalism then you truly are ignorant and best to go get yourself sterilized for the sake of the Human race.

 

[mash107]

No, America did not have the laws in place before Enron happened and the current financial crisis for which it applies to.

Regulation my ass. The form for companies to apply for a bailout is two pages long, one page of which is bank contact information. Christsakes, my college applications were longer.

The fed currently refuses to disclose who are the recipients of over $2 trillion dollars.

Predatory lending and loans in which there was no regulation for.

No regulation for Credit Card companies which can jack up your rates by outrageous amounts if you're late for one payment. (Even though most fail to know that plenty of companies just withhold the checks until it's past the due date or simply rip them up so they can bash you with high prices).

Or how about the banks who told people they COULD take out $400,000 in loans for a home,etc with giving the people delusions that they can one day pay them back when they cannot. This is one of the reasons of why we are where we currently are.

If you truly believe that America has the current laws in place to regulate Wall Street from Pure Capitalism then you truly are ignorant and best to go get yourself sterilized for the sake of the Human race.

We hardly have pure capitalism... and that's exactly the problem. If you think this mess of an interventionist mixed economy is pure capitalism, then you should follow your own advice. No bank or company should be bailed out in laissez-faire capitalism.... you're just contradicting yourself all over the place. Bailouts, or the promise of one, rather, are precisely why this crisis came about.

The problem was caused -by- government intervention in the markets. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913, and since then, our banks have been given a free ride. They can give loans to whomever they want, whenever they want, without worrying about the consequences of those loans. After all, the Fed is "the lender of last resort". That's hardly pure capitalism. Our situation came about precisely because government had promised bailouts to those banks that might misbehave, and the due diligence that otherwise would've existed had been discarded. Do you think it's just coincidence that we've had two huge banking failures in just 20 years? There's systemic problem with that industry, and it's called governmental regulations and the Federal Reserve.

Regulations only come from within and the marketplace. When government tries to make laws, they usually get them wrong, and lot's of unintended consequences ensue. Since you brought up Enron, which is precisely was a mess because people think the government regulations, through the SEC, is worth a shit, the law that resulted was the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has absolutely stifled companies from going public:

youtube.com/watch?v=I-giZ_yBjEM

 

[Orange_Juice]

Without banking regulation, the SEC, the TVA and other reforms the country probaly couldn't have gotten out of the Depression. But most people know the New Deal only helped us survive the depression, not to end it. The New Deal just wasn't big enough to jump statrt the economy, that took WW2 to do.

 

[Orange_Juice]

Indeed, he did.

Please read The New Dealer's War for more info. Or for a more mainstream and liberal view, look at the work of Charles Beard. Actually there was a program on the History Channel which covered this.

Also to the conservatives who think WWII got us out of the depression: We've spent a ton of money on our current war--where has it gotten us? Or the Vietnam war--we should have been just peachy during the 70's. War doesn't create prosperity! It is a regrettable necessity sometimes, but let's not kid ourselves--it is just another form of socialism. If war could end depressions, then we could just hire a million people to build a city, and then have our military blow it up. This is no different than having a "socialist" program where a million men dig holes in the dirt, and another million men fill it up the next day. Yes, they are employed, but they are not producing anything useful.

The spending on those wars was nothing compared to WW2

 

[Orange_Juice]

Okay first off if you track, the ups and downs of the great Depression you find that every time the New Dealers got their way the economy got worse when they were held at bay by the Supreme Court it began to recover.

2nd the president isn't in charge of the economy. The congress is, as it is they who hold the purse strings. One or both houses of the congress of the United States has been held by the Democrats for all but four of the last 70 years. Neither Nixon, Ford or GHW Bush were arguably conservative and the only conservative thing Bush did was the tax cuts.

Total bull sh--. FDR got the banks working again, cut down unemployment etc. When the Conservatives were able to cut federal spending, as in 1937, we saw the depression return with a furry. That's just a fact, unlike the garbage you just made up

 

[Orange_Juice]

I appluade you efforts to wake up these faith based Misesian idealogues, but they simply do not want to believe it.

Now at lot of us who are old enough know plenty of people who lived through the depression, who worked in CCC or WPA projects and who can tell us stories of how FDR's actions saved them and their families from homelssness and starvation.

These people do not care about that.

They don't care what the world's most emminent economists are saying either.

They don't care to acknowledge the recent history about why we're in this mess, either.

They are idealogues and facts simple do NOT matter.

Any fact you can bring them that refutes their idealogical belief system will be, according to them, a lie.

Nothing short of THEM going broke and having to cope with what's happening now is going to wake them up.

Lucky them!

Great post

 

[garyd]

And utterly retarded. I am sixty both my parents and grandparents went through the Great Depression the worst and longest economic contration since the Middle Ages.

The only good thing about all this is that the American people have a whole lot less patience now than they did 70 odd years ago so Obama is only going to get about two years to turn this around and if his solutiions fail as they almost certainly shall as they failed Roosevelt before him people will begin hunting someone with different solutions.

Those particular awards are annual awards generally conferred upon the most hardline leftist idiot economist currently available.