Please elaborate.
(snip)
It may seem strange to lump Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt together. The conventional wisdom is that Hoover was a supporter of laissez-faire capitalism whose inactivity let corrupt business practices drive the country into the Depression, while Roosevelt reformed the economy and therefore pulled the country out of the Depression. Neither impression is true. Hoover was a Teddy Roosevelt "Progressive" who believed in activist government. Federal spending increased faster during Hoover's four years than during the first seven years of the New Deal. Hoover promoted high wages for workers and high prices for farmers. Twice, in 1920 as chief of the wartime Food Relief Administration and then after he became President in 1929, Hoover wrecked the American agricultural export market by using the power of the federal government to drive up agricultural prices. That was supposed to be good for farmers, but it simply destroyed their foreign markets. Hoover then destroyed almost all export markets by signing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930, even though he was warned in a petition from 1000 economists not to do it. Within a year American trade had fallen more than 50% and unemployment had jumped from 6% to 17%. Later Roosevelt said that farmers didn't need an export market anyway! (For the details of this, see The Farm Fiasco, by James Bovard, ICS Press, San Francisco, 1991.)
http://www.friesian.com/sayslaw.htm