....it was political.
The damage was to our Constitution, and to the noble experiment in self-governance.
1. America was the dream of fine and noble men, who viewed their fellow citizens as equally fine and noble.
They understood human nature, and tried their best to write the operating manual of America, the United States Constitution, to check avarice and baser instincts, and to balance differing views.
But....Murphy was an optimist.
And men with a need for power found a tool to corrupt government....
"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
Rahm Emanuel
....do things that would be considered illegal.
And should be.
2. .The fear engendered by the recession that began under Herbert Hoover was the perfect tool, the serious crisis, that lesser men than our Founders could use to usurp power, and ignore the Constitution.
Economist Alan Reynolds writes: “People were left with the feeling that massive economic contractions could occur at any moment, without warning, without cause. That fear has been exploited ever since as the major justification for virtually unlimited federal intervention in economic affairs.”
Alan Reynolds, “What Do We Know About the Great Crash?” National Review, November 9, 1979, p. 1416.
3. Few ever speak of any depressions or recessions prior to the "Great Depression."
Know how many there were?
Over thirty.
List of recessions in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Without the unprecedented governmental mistakes of Herbert Hoover, and the copy-cat policies of Franklin Roosevelt, the hard times would have ended in two or three years at the most, and likely sooner than that. But massive political bungling instead prolonged the misery for over 10 years.
Unemployment in 1930 averaged a mildly recessionary 8.9 percent, up from 3.2 percent in 1929. It shot up rapidly until peaking out at more than 25 percent in 1933.
a. In 1931, in some of the darkest days of the Great Depression and the middle of the Hoover administration, unemployment rate stood at 17.4 %. Seven years later, after five years of FDR, and literally hundreds of wildly ambitious new government programs, more than doubling of federal spending, the national unemployment rate stood at – 17.4 %. At no point during the 1930’s did unemployment go below 14 %.
b. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., liberal New Deal historian wrote in The National Experience, in 1963, “Though the policies of the Hundred Days had ended despair, they had not produce recovery…” He also wrote honestly about the devastating crash of 1937- in the midst of the “second New Deal” and Roosevelt’s second term. “The collapse in the months after September 1937 was actually more severe than it had been in the first nine months of the depression: national income fell 13 %, payrolls 35 %, durable goods production 50 %, profits 78% .
Could anyone have done any better?
For sure.....if they had wanted to.
The damage was to our Constitution, and to the noble experiment in self-governance.
1. America was the dream of fine and noble men, who viewed their fellow citizens as equally fine and noble.
They understood human nature, and tried their best to write the operating manual of America, the United States Constitution, to check avarice and baser instincts, and to balance differing views.
But....Murphy was an optimist.
And men with a need for power found a tool to corrupt government....
"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
Rahm Emanuel
....do things that would be considered illegal.
And should be.
2. .The fear engendered by the recession that began under Herbert Hoover was the perfect tool, the serious crisis, that lesser men than our Founders could use to usurp power, and ignore the Constitution.
Economist Alan Reynolds writes: “People were left with the feeling that massive economic contractions could occur at any moment, without warning, without cause. That fear has been exploited ever since as the major justification for virtually unlimited federal intervention in economic affairs.”
Alan Reynolds, “What Do We Know About the Great Crash?” National Review, November 9, 1979, p. 1416.
3. Few ever speak of any depressions or recessions prior to the "Great Depression."
Know how many there were?
Over thirty.
List of recessions in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Without the unprecedented governmental mistakes of Herbert Hoover, and the copy-cat policies of Franklin Roosevelt, the hard times would have ended in two or three years at the most, and likely sooner than that. But massive political bungling instead prolonged the misery for over 10 years.
Unemployment in 1930 averaged a mildly recessionary 8.9 percent, up from 3.2 percent in 1929. It shot up rapidly until peaking out at more than 25 percent in 1933.
a. In 1931, in some of the darkest days of the Great Depression and the middle of the Hoover administration, unemployment rate stood at 17.4 %. Seven years later, after five years of FDR, and literally hundreds of wildly ambitious new government programs, more than doubling of federal spending, the national unemployment rate stood at – 17.4 %. At no point during the 1930’s did unemployment go below 14 %.
b. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., liberal New Deal historian wrote in The National Experience, in 1963, “Though the policies of the Hundred Days had ended despair, they had not produce recovery…” He also wrote honestly about the devastating crash of 1937- in the midst of the “second New Deal” and Roosevelt’s second term. “The collapse in the months after September 1937 was actually more severe than it had been in the first nine months of the depression: national income fell 13 %, payrolls 35 %, durable goods production 50 %, profits 78% .
Could anyone have done any better?
For sure.....if they had wanted to.
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