Sure the New Deal was such a great thing, adding government involvement in more things that prolonged the depression. A coward president that let the rest of the world fight for world freedom while he sat back until Japan attacked Pearl. A president that prosecuted a farmer for growing wheat for his own use. Yep a real stand up numbskull like Obama.
Yea, old FDR only brought us the greatest yearly increase in GDP, and the largest drop in unemployment in America history.
He probably should have kept on Andrew Mellon as his Treasury Secretary and followed the advice of the Austrian School like Herbert Hoover did.
Economic Policy Under Hoover
Throughout this decline—which carried real GNP per worker down to a level 40 percent below that which it had attained in 1929, and which saw the unemployment rise to take in more than a quarter of the labor force—the government did not try to prop up aggregate demand. The only expansionary fiscal policy action undertaken was the Veterans’ Bonus, passed over President Hoover’s veto. That aside, the full employment budget surplus did not fall over 1929–33.
The Federal Reserve did not use open market operations to keep the nominal money supply from falling. Instead, its only significant systematic use of open market operations was in the other direction: to raise interest rates and discourage gold outflows after the United Kingdom abandoned the gold standard in the fall of 1931.
This inaction did not come about because they did not understand the tools of monetary policy. This inaction did not come about because the Federal Reserve was constrained by the necessity of defending the gold standard. The Federal Reserve knew what it was doing: it was letting the private sector handle the Depression in its own fashion. It saw the private sector’s task as the “liquidation” of the American economy. It feared that expansionary monetary policy would impede the necessary private-sector process of readjustment.
Contemplating in retrospect the wreck of his countryÂ’s economy and his own presidency, Herbert Hoover wrote bitterly in his memoirs about those who had advised inaction during the downslide:
The ‘leave-it-alone liquidationists’ headed by Secretary of the Treasury Mellon…felt that government must keep its hands off and let the slump liquidate itself. Mr. Mellon had only one formula: ‘Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate’.…He held that even panic was not altogether a bad thing. He said: ‘It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people’.
The Federal Reserve took almost no steps to halt the slide into the Great Depression over 1929–33. Instead, the Federal Reserve acted as if appropriate policy was not to try to avoid the oncoming Great Depression, but to allow it to run its course and “liquidate” the unprofitable portions of the private economy.
In adopting such “liquidationist” policies, the Federal Reserve was merely following the recommendations provided by an economic theory of depressions that was in fact common before the Keynesian Revolution and was held by economists like Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Robbins, and Joseph Schumpeter.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
And then, have the audacity to call themselves conservative.
Watch them shifty eyes of the so called conservatives that act like the socialist in the closet. You can see how Cat Stevens turned out, now that cat is out of the cradle an is coming out.
Whatever you want to believe, the jobs he created were building war machines. If it were not for WWII he wouldn't of had a recovery. Liberals and their socialist heros, what a wonder.
