 Franklin Delano Raines |
Posted on 10/08/2008 6:26:51 PM PDT by Behind Liberal Lines
Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.
In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.
(Excerpt) Read more at liberalfascism.nationalreview.com ...
But, but, FDR soothed the nation’s fears. It doesn’t matter whether or not the economy recovered, because FDR was talking to us on the radio.
Read “The Roosevelt Myth” by John T. Flynn. He was a muckraking populist jounalist who saw through Roosevelt’s cranky socialism.
We can't take anything you say about FDR seriously. You didn't even know about his televised fireside chats. Just ask Joe Biden.
I thought to myself "that is 8 years after Roosevelt took over" he must have not done much to improve things.
WWII is what took us out of it.
I will say that Roosevelt was an effective war leader despite having a bunch of Communists in his administration. I guess the fact that we were allies with them is part of it.
Franklin Delano Raines |
Well gosh darn it STAND UP FRANKLIN,
STAND UPuuuhh, UUhh, oh G*D love ya FDR,
Well lets stand up for FDR,
STAND UP!
We knew this.
But it’s nice to finally have confirmation.
No s*, Dick Tracy. This has been known by sensible people for years.
The economy was recovering and the country was starting to come out of the Great Depression in the mid 1930s, but FDR’s policies, and Fed mismanagement, threw it right back in again.
Naturally the leftist Establishment tells a different story, but sensible economists have long since debunked it.
“WWII is what took us out of it.”
Not really. Wars do not cure depressions, since wars are not productive in a meaningful sense of the word. In strictly economic terms, we might as well have burned trillions of dollars.
“I will say that Roosevelt was an effective war leader despite having a bunch of Communists in his administration.”
I don’t second-guess how the war was prosecuted. We won, after all. However, the way FDR handled Stalin at the end of the war was inexcusable, and erased most of the progress we had made by defeating Hitler.
“Naturally the leftist Establishment tells a different story, but sensible economists have long since debunked it.”
Murray Rothbard wrote all about it back in 1963 in “America’s Great Depression.”
Shows people were as ignorant of economics back then as now since FDR got re-elected with landslides in 36 and 40
Without Hitler god only knows when the US would have come out of the depression.
“Without Hitler god only knows when the US would have come out of the depression.”
During Hitler’s reign production went up, but we hardly enjoyed it. The government rationed essential goods (with a broad definition of what was essential), there were wage and price controls, etc. After Hitler, we went back into a recession. I, for one, don’t thank Hitler for anything.
“Without Hitler god only knows when the US would have come out of the depression.”
During Hitler’s reign production went up, but we hardly enjoyed it. The government rationed essential goods (with a broad definition of what was essential), there were wage and price controls, etc. After Hitler, we went back into a recession. I, for one, don’t thank Hitler for anything.
Read Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man” - FDR had no clue as to what to do to set the economy right and most of what he did do was pure experimentation - so unsure of which way to turn was he that at one point he sent one of his minions to a European conference to argue for a particular policy, and within two days sent another subordinate on his way to the same conference with instructions to argue for the exact opposite policy - the fact that the depression lasted for eight years after Roosevelt took office with unemployment just as high within a year of its ending as at the beginning should be enough to burst the FDR balloon.......
“Murray Rothbard wrote all about it back in 1963 in ‘America’s Great Depression.’”
Actually, Rothbard, after outlining the Austrian theory of the business cycle, spent all his time proving that Hoover was an interventionist. But so long as the reader bears in mind that FDR did everything Hoover did times ten, the book can be seen as an indictment of FDR.
Socialists love to be taken care of, even if it means their demise. Other people like to take advantage of feeble minded socialist types and take wealth and power, which the socialists give up in search of surrogate parents. FDR knew this, and Democrats know this and practice it every day.
An excellent book. I recommend it too.
I could’ve saved the economists a lot of time by directing them to the mises.org web site.
That's choice!!
btt
Holy cow! We almost did become a European-style social welfare, corporate state. Well, I guess we’ll soon find out what we missed the first time around.
Thanks. I’m certainly not defending FDR.
George Reisman, an economist at Pepperdine University, as well as a former pupil of Mises at NYU in the 1950s (and a longtime member of Ayn Rand’s inner circle) has a series of lectures on 10 CDs based on his treatise “Capitalism.” In one of the lectures, he spends quite a bit of time on the Great Depression. No surprises, but a very clear explanation. He debunks the idea that WWII brought us out of the depression. What brought the economy back into alignment — meaning that payrolls could be met with the actual quantity of money at the time and mass unemployment could finally end — were wage and price controls, which brought wages and prices back down to something within the range of what the market would have established had they not been artificially raised in the Hoover and FDR years. Prosperity, however, did not reappear until the end of the war, when homecoming GIs returned to work, and the added productivity from an expanded workforce reduced prices enough to increase “real wages.”
Apparently, there was a stock market crash and recession around 1920 that came and went. Few noticed it because of the government’s “do nothing” policy. Not sure if we have Wilson or Harding to thank for that, but we sure could use a policy like that now.
I was talking to a friend about the Great Depression, and he said that economists point to the Dust Bowl and all the displaced farm/food workers and disruption in the food supply that triggered the event.
ping
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.