laffs@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
'em-all.com wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 18:36:13 GMT, "Crescentius
> Vespasianus" <jazzyboss@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> > In the final stages--- Unions
> >will be banned, as everyone will be of the same Union, called the
State.
See well-known racist and usenet sociopath once again ****wittedly
misinterpret American history, thusly:
>
> Thus ushering in what FAILED so miserably pre-roosevelt
> days, eh HandSpankus Stupidious?
Better than your usual blurting of racial slurs and terror threats, I
suppose...
Great myths about the great depression
=A9 by Thomas Sowell
October 9, 2003
They say "truth will out" but sometimes it takes a long time. For more
than
half a century, it has been a "well-known fact" that President Franklin
D=2E
Roosevelt got us out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. That view
was never
pervasive among economists, and even J.M. Keynes -- a liberal icon --
criticized some of FDR's policies as hindering recovery from the
depression.
Only now has a book been written in language that non-economists can
understand
which argues persuasively that the policies of the Roosevelt
administration
actually prolonged the depression and made it worse. That book is
"FDR's Folly"
by Jim Powell. It is very readable, factual and insightful -- and is
endorsed
by two Nobel Prizewinning economists.
If the word "folly" seems a little dismissive, read the book first.
Someone
described FDR's trust-busting Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold
as
being like one of the Marx brothers who went into government by
mistake. That
description would apply to many of the others around FDR, including his
much-vaunted "brain-trust" of presumptuous and self-righteous people.
It is painfully obvious that President Roosevelt himself had no serious
understanding of economics, any more than his Republican predecessor,
Herbert
Hoover, had. The difference was that Roosevelt had boundless
self-confidence
and essentially pushed some of the misconceptions of President Hoover
to their
logical extreme.
The grand myth for decades was that Hoover was unwilling to use the
powers of
government to come to the aid of the people during the Great Depression
but
that Roosevelt was more caring and did. In reality, both presidents
represented
a major break with the past by casting the federal government in the
role of
rescuer of the economy in its distress.
Scholarly studies of the history of these two administrations have in
recent
years come to see FDR's New Deal as Herbert Hoover's policies writ
large and in
bolder strokes.
Those who judge by intentions may say that this was a good thing. But
those who
judge by results point out that none of the previous depressions --
during
which the federal government essentially did nothing -- lasted anywhere
near as
long as the depression in which the federal government decided that it
had to
"do something."
In "FDR's Folly," author Jim Powell spells out just what the Roosevelt
administration did and what consequences followed. It tried to raise
farm
prices by destroying vast amounts of produce -- at a time when hunger
was a
serious problem in the United States. It imposed minimum wage rates
that priced
unskilled labor out of jobs, at a time of massive unemployment.
Behind both policies was the belief that what was needed was more
purchasing
power and that this could be achieved by government policies to raise
the
prices received by farmers and workers. But prices do not automatically
translate into greater purchasing power, unless people buy as much at
higher
prices as they would at lower prices -- which they seldom do.
Then there were the monetary authorities contracting the money supply
in the
midst of the biggest depression in history -- when the economy was
showing some
signs of revival, until their monetary contraction touched off another
big
downturn.
With policy after policy and program after program, "FDR's Folly"
traces the
high hopes and disastrous consequences. It would be funny, like the
Keystone
cops running into one another and falling down, except that millions of
people
were in economic desperation while this farce was being played out in
Wa****ngton.
Perhaps worse than any specific policy under FDR was the atmosphere of
uncertainty generated by incessant new experiments. Billions of dollars
of
investment were needed to create millions of jobs for the unemployed.
But
investors were reluctant to risk their money while the rules of the
game were
constantly being changed in Wa****ngton, amid strident anti-business
rhetoric.
Some of the people who most admired and almost wor****pped FDR -- poor
people
and blacks, for example -- were hurt the most by amateurish tinkering
with the
economy by Roosevelt's New Deal administration. This book is an
education in
itself, both in history and in economics. It is also a warning of what
can
happen when leaders are chosen for their charm, charisma and rhetoric.
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