Free Republic

... The Great Depression was caused by misguided government policies adopted to avoid the "unsatisfactory conditions" signaled by the crash. The run-of-the-mill recession that ought to have followed the crash was magnified by the policies of the federal government during the administration of Herbert Hoover. In a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research published last August, Lee E. Ohanian examines a continuing mistake during the Hoover administration that helped transform difficulty into calamity. An economics professor at UCLA, Ohanian has written numerous papers on the Depression. In one earlier paper, he pinned the persistence of high unemployment on...

It is a cliché that if we do not study the past we are condemned to repeat it. Almost equally certain, however, is that if there are lessons to be learned from an historical episode, the political class will draw all the wrong ones — and often deliberately so. Far from viewing the past as a potential source of wisdom and insight, political regimes have a habit of employing history as an ideological weapon, to be distorted and manipulated in the service of present-day ambitions. That’s what Winston Churchill meant when he described the history of the Soviet Union as...

I too woke up to the news about President Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize and saying WTF several times. In an effort to bring some perspective and a warning to "Da Man" at a time of his glory, I want to remind all of a predecessor of his that DID NOT get the Peace Prize but should have and probably would have gotten it eventually except for a greater tragedy! At the start of World War 1, this man was an international business man, lecturer and author who by his own efforts had become a millionaire. In 1914 he...

The political Left likes to equate Presidents it doesn't like, especially Republicans, to Herbert Hoover. The truth is that Hoover was one of America's better Presidents who found himself (like George W. Bush) in circumstances created by greedy and irresponsible speculation in the stock market and/or real estate. (Democrat Bill Clinton was similarly in the wrong place at the wrong time when the dot-com market crashed.) Hoover's successor, Franklin Roosevelt, did not get the United States out of the Great Depression; the Second World War, which suddenly created millions of jobs in defense industries and the Armed Forces, did. Let's...

In 1932, FDR had an opportunity to change the conventional way that governments deal with a recession. His predecessor, Herbert Hoover, who also had a tendency towards central planning, had started the process. Instead of allowing markets to correct themselves as they had in all the previous panics, as depressions were then called, both men instituted programs of government intervention. Hoover signed the Smoot Hawley tariff even after many of the leading economists of the time personally implored him not to sign it. A tariff would help improve farm prices, which was a cornerstone of the progressive movement. He asked...

Note: The following text is a quote: September 11, 2009 ICE works with local law enforcement to arrest 23 gang members BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Twenty men, two women and one juvenile with ties to the violent gangs Sureno-13, La Quemada, MS 13, Brown Pride 13, Southside Locotes, Lejion Negra (Mexico) and Judas 13 (Mexico) are facing deportation following a four-day enforcement operation involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and several local law enforcement agencies. The arrests were made as part of an ongoing initiative by ICE's National Gang Unit dubbed Operation Community Shield. As part of the initiative, ICE...

What caused the Great Depression? There are plenty of theories and arguments out there, and I don’t plan to review them. But a new one (at least new to me) is contained in a paper by Lee Ohanian, a U.C.L.A. economist, that was released today by the National Bureau of Economic Research. He blames Herbert Hoover. That is not exactly original; the Democrats ran against Hoover for a generation after he left office, much as some would now like to run against George W. Bush. But his criticism is that Hoover was too kind to workers, which is not exactly...

An economist is saying that President Hoover set the stage to worsen The Great Depression because of his pro-labor union stance. Pro-labor policies pushed by President Herbert Hoover after the stock market crash of 1929 accounted for close to two-thirds of the drop in the nation's gross domestic product over the two years that followed, causing what might otherwise have been a bad recession to slip into the Great Depression, a UCLA economist concludes in a new study. Lee E. Ohanian, a UCLA professor of economics, lays the worst of the Depression at the feet of Hoover who, in his...

The city of Hoover will get $400,000 in federal stimulus money for a landscaping and beautification project at the Interstate 65 and U.S. 31 interchange, city officials learned this week. The project will be paid completely with federal funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, according to the Alabama Department of Transportation. The city will not be required to provide any matching funds for the project. Mayor Tony Petelos said news of 100 percent federal funding comes as the city is completing the spruce-up of the Alford Avenue interchange, which is the first Hoover exit on I-65 South and...

What Is commmunism part 1Part 2 A prophetic, scary and shocking reel from the 50s about communist infiltration in America. Herbert Philbrick, a former FBI agent who infiltrated the communist party describes the horrors of communism here and abroad and about infiltration into unions, government and churches and elsewhere. Looking back and looking to the here and now, we see that men like Philbrick, Hoover and McCarthy were not just using scare tactics. They were right all along. And as Philbrick points out, as our Democracy fails, we will look back as to how we went from being the freest...

Congressional Democrats Bankrupted the Nation *snip* The End In April 2001, before the events of 9/11 and just after entering the White House, President Bush began signaling warnings to members of congress that both Fannie and Freddie were headed into deep treacherous waters which could cause “strong repercussions in financial markets.” In early 2003, the Bush White House upgraded its warnings to “a systemic risk that could extend well beyond just the housing markets.” On September 10, 2003, Bush Treasury Secretary John Snow testified in congress that something had to be done to confront the growing storm at Fannie and...

Then the question which remains is, What ought Some-of-us to do for Others-of-us?" The Case of the Forgotten Man Farther Considered There is a beautiful notion afloat in our literature and in the minds of our people that men are born to certain "natural rights." If that were true, there would be something on earth which was got for nothing, and this world would not be the place it is at all. The fact is that there is no right whatever inherited by man which has not an equivalent and corresponding duty by the side of it, as the...

What we do know from the tapes was that Hoover thought he had flawless gaydar. Beschloss writes that Hoover believed, based on a report from liberal columnist Drew Pearson, that the Republicans were about to drop a "bombshell" on a Johnson administration official on Oct. 31, a bit of intelligence that he had passed along to Johnson. On the morning of Oct. 31, Johnson telephoned Hoover for new gossip, and the conversation ambled toward a Navy employee. LBJ: … They raised the question of the way he combed his hair and the way he did something else, but they had...

One of the darker periods of modern American history was J. Edgar Hoover's long reign over the FBI, as we have learned since he died in 1972. So it is more than a historical footnote to discover new records showing that prominent public television broadcaster Bill Moyers participated in Hoover's exploits. ...

In today’s Washington Post, we learn that “J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI found itself quietly consumed with the vexing question of whether [Lyndon Johnson aide Jack] Valenti was gay.” According to the article, “the files, obtained by The Washington Post under the federal Freedom of Information Act, provide further insight into the conduct of the FBI under Hoover, for whom damaging personal information on the powerful was a useful tool in his interactions with presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard M. Nixon.”

“Everybody is getting excited about the inauguration, where they think Barack Obama is going to ride in and save the day, and nothing could be further from the truth. A lot of people have such high hopes and such high expectations that he’s (Obama) is going to bring the change we need. Unfortunately nothing is going to change, change is less government, change would be sound money, change would be more freedom, were not going to get any of that, we are just going to get bigger government under Barack than we did under Bush. That’s not change at all...

One of the guilty pleasures of grading essay exams is to chortle over the amazing and amusing bloopers of struggling students. It's hard not to laugh when a student writes that Columbus discovered the “earth,” or tells you a story about Galileo dropping corpses off towers. The fact is, however, that most of my “student” bloopers are really professor bloopers: Students got things wrong because I hadn't explained things quite as clearly as I might have or because I assumed students knew things they had never been taught. Why did one of my students think Galileo had done experiments with...

Sure, the vast majority of Americans think the New Deal worked well. But are conservatives right? Did the New Deal's "massive government intervention prolong the Great Depression?" Ummm ... no. On deeper examination, I discovered that the right bases its New Deal revisionism on the short-lived recession in a year straddling 1937 and 1938. But that was four years into Roosevelt's term -- four years marked by spectacular economic growth. Additionally, the fleeting decline happened not because of the New Deal's spending programs, but because Roosevelt momentarily listened to conservatives and backed off them. As Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman notes,...

With both Barack Obama's supporters and the media looking forward to the new administration's policies being similar to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies during the 1930s depression, it may be useful to look at just what those policies were and-- more important-- what their consequences were. The prevailing view in many quarters is that the stock market crash of 1929 was a failure of the free market that led to massive unemployment in the 1930s-- and that it was intervention of Roosevelt's New Deal policies that rescued the economy. It is such a good story that it seems a pity...

The Next Great Depression --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The main lesson we need to learn from the Great Depression is that government programs prolong, rather than correct depressions. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No, I am not getting ready to join the ranks of those clever economists and financial prognosticators who periodically cop a book deal by peddling a hyped-up title that feeds our perverse appetite for scary scenarios—Financial Armageddon, Get Rich While All Your Neighbors Go Broke, How To Prosper From the End of the World As We Know It. I'm sure I'm passing up a lucrative opportunity. In fact, given the jarring financial convulsions in...

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,...

The current financial crisis has revived powerful misconceptions about the Great Depression. Those who misinterpret the past are all too likely to repeat the exact same mistakes that made the Great Depression so deep and devastating. Here are five interrelated and durable myths about the 1929-39 Depression:

Review: The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes By Lil Tuttle What happens if government intervenes in a nation’s economic crisis and makes it worse? Amity Shlaes tells such a story in her book, The Forgotten Man: a New History of the Great Depression (HarperCollins). School children are generally taught this standard history lesson about the Great Depression: The 1920s was a period of false growth, high living and low morals brought to a halt by the 1929 stock market crash. The crash led to crippling inflation and the nation’s economic collapse. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took control and ushered...

John McCain said something quite different in Jacksonville, Fla., on Sept. 15, in an effort to be a calming voice during a one-day stock slump (the market ended up that week). He said, “There’s been tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall Street and ... people are frightened by these events. Our economy, I think, still the fundamentals of our economy are strong. But these are very, very difficult times. And I promise you, we will never put America in this position again. We will clean up Wall Street. We will reform government.” In marked contrast to the world...

The title of this entry is not the name of a Mexican-chauvinist soft drink, but of a chapter in my favorite polemical history, Paul Johnson’s Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties. (As I may have mentioned earlier in this space, you should read the first edition of this book from 1983 it you can find it, and not the unfortunate later attempt to extend the story into the 1990s.) The chapter deals with the beginning of the Great Depression and of the collapse of the liberal (in the 19th-century sense) world order. Johnson was keen to...

Vice presidential candidate Joe Biden says today’s leaders should take a lesson from the history books and follow fellow Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to a financial crisis. “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened,”‘ Barack Obama’s running mate recently told the “CBS Evening News.” Except, Republican Herbert Hoover was in office when the stock market crashed in October 1929. There also was no television at the time; TV wasn’t introduced to the public until a decade...

WASHINGTON - Vice presidential candidate Joe Biden said today's leaders should take a lesson from the history books and follow fellow Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to a financial crisis. "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened,'" Barack Obama's running mate recently told the "CBS Evening News."

By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin 09/23/2008 We've all met Barack "Neville Chamberlain" Obama and Barack "Rev. God Damn America" Obama, so now let me introduce you to a third face: Barack "Herbert Hoover" Obama. Just as Sen. Obama learned nothing from Chamberlain and his talks with Hitler, and so proposes to talk without preconditions to Amadinejad, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and the rest of the axis of evil, by like token, he's learned nothing from the lessons of Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. Hoover was long the great nemesis of the Democratic Party, but that was perhaps before Sen....

Each year, on August 10th, we celebrate the birthday of the man who loved poetry, dogs and fishing (not necessarily in that order). We have a fun-filled author event, live musical entertainment, Happy Birthday Herbie cakes, our world-famous "Herbert Sherbert" punch, Herbie trivia contest (all the answers are available in the Herbert Hoover fun facts posted throughout the bookshop on his birthday) and our own Herbie shrine loaded with Herbert Hoover memorabilia and our private collection of Hoover books for guests to peruse.

Short Pants’ Short Memory Swift-boat THIS.by Steve Finefrock Michael Kinsley is wearing his intellectual short pants again, in his essay on Swiftboating. Wishing upon wishes for a ‘clean’ campaign of purity, he asserts, “Swift-boat is shorthand for the brilliant, despicable Republican campaign strategy in 2004 that turned John Kerry's honorable service in Vietnam into a negative factor in his campaign. The phrase has become more broadly the term for a particular category of campaign tactics and has even become a verb. To ‘swift-boat’ somebody is to use these tactics against him or her.� Kinsley is not stupid, nor ignorant, but...

A CONSERVATIVE PRESIDENT who is deeply unpopular with Americans. A country facing profound economic and security challenges. New technologies upending old media. A cohort of new immigrants and a bulging generation of young people ready to transform the political calculus. 2008? No, 1932, the tail end of the Hoover administration. And you know how that one turned out. FDR and his fellow progressives took on the challenges of their day and built the domestic programs and international institutions that ushered in an era of unrivaled prosperity and stability. They used a new medium—radio—to reach citizens, and fashioned a new majority...

The Great Depression was the worst economic slump ever in U.S. history, and one which spread to virtually all of the industrialized world. The depression began in late 1929 and lasted for about a decade. Many factors played a role in bringing about the depression; however, the main cause for the Great Depression was the combination of the greatly unequal distribution of wealth throughout the 1920's, and the extensive stock market speculation that took place during the latter part that same decade. The maldistribution of wealth in the 1920's existed on many levels. Money was distributed disparately between the rich...

If government wishes to alleviate, rather than aggravate, a depression, its only valid course is laissez-faire — to leave the economy alone. Only if there is no interference, direct or threatened, with prices, wage rates, and business liquidation will the necessary adjustment proceed with smooth dispatch. Any propping up of shaky positions postpones liquidation and aggravates unsound conditions. Propping up wage rates creates mass unemployment, and bolstering prices perpetuates and creates unsold surpluses. Moreover, a drastic cut in the government budget — both in taxes and expenditures — will of itself speed adjustment by changing social choice toward more saving...

A Polish worker has come up with an unusual excuse after being caught in the act with a vacuum cleaner. # How About That: More weird news from around the world The building contractor claimed he was cleaning his underpants with Henry Hoover when he was found naked and on his knees in a hospital's staff canteen. A stunned security guard stumbled onto the man in the middle of a compromising act with the cleaner, which has a large smiley face painted on its front and a hose protruding from its "nose". According to the Sun, the contractor was supposed...

Furthermore, the International News Service reported in Berlin (March 8, 1938) that: For the first time in his career, Reichsfuehrer Adolph Hitler today heard from an American statesman a forthright denunciation of Nazism as a practical and enduring force in world affairs. The detractor, speaking straight from the shoulder, was Herbert Clark Hoover, thirty-first president of the United States, who spent 40 minutes in private with the Fuehrer... The piece also noted that: Without mincing words, Hoover bluntly informed Hitler that the United States will never become reconciled to understanding or even having the slightest tolerance for Nazism as a...

Herbert Hoover and Media by: Jeremy Hempel, February 04, 2008 President Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) had some encouraging words for discouraged citizens plagued by today’s one-sided approach to media. A Republican who rose from son of a blacksmith to become the president of the Unites States, his administration faced the Great Depression. The former president warned of the dangers that a mass communication system controlled by one way of thinking would sway the nation into “untruth”. The 31st president wrote to the book The Challenge to Liberty in 1934 saying: “Bureaucracy has already developed a vast ramifying propaganda subtly designed to...

WASHINGTON - Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a plan to suspend the rules against illegal detention and arrest up to 12,000 Americans he suspected of being disloyal, according to a newly declassified document. Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, less than two weeks after the Korean War began. But there is no evidence to suggest that President Truman or any subsequent president approved any part of Hoover's proposal to house suspect Americans in military and federal prisons. Hoover had wanted Truman to declare the mass arrests necessary to "protect the country against...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks advanced on Friday, sending the benchmark S&P 500 index (^SPX - News) to a record as a solid employment report rekindled optimism about the outlook for growth and profits. The prospect of continued strength in the economy boosted a broad range of equity sectors, including technology, basic materials, industrials, financials and consumer-oriented plays, such as retailers. Pharmaceutical shares also showed strength, with shares of Merck & Co (NYSE:MRK - News) among the top advancers in both the Dow and the S&P 500. "The unemployment report was a good report," said Stephen Carl, principal and head...

A stranger stood at the gate of Hell And the Devil himself had answered the bell He looked him over from head to toe And said “My friend, I’d like to know What you have done in the line of sin To entitle you to come within?” Then Franklin D. with his usual guile Stepped forth and flashed his toothy smile. “When I took over in ’33, A nation’s faith was mine”, said he “I promised this and I promised that, And I calmed them down with a fireside chat. I spent their money on fishing trips And I fished...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Consumer prices rose less than expected in June, bringing inflation outside of food and energy over the past 12 months to its lowest in more than three years, government data showed on Tuesday. Other data showed that personal spending rose by the smallest amount since September, and was unchanged after adjustment for inflation. The data reinforced a view that tame inflationary pressures will allow the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates on hold at 5.25 percent for the time being, although markets are still expecting the central bank to start cutting rates by year end. The 0.1...

NEW YORK (AP) -- The Dow Jones industrial average swept past 14,000 for the first time Tuesday following a relatively mild inflation report and a wave of generally upbeat earnings reports. The stock market's best-known indicator crossed 14,000 in the first half-hour of trading, rising to 14,002.60 and having taken just 57 trading days to make the trip from 13,000. Stocks have risen fairly steadily since the spring amid a continuum of buyout news and evidence that despite higher fuel prices and the ongoing problems in the housing market and mortgage lending industry, consumers are spending and companies remain optimistic...

The Hoover Institution at Stanford University has just posted a 15-minute interview with Republican presidential almost-candidate Fred Thompson by Peter Robinson, a Fellow at the Hoover Institution, on Google Video. It's a nice serious counterpoint to Thompson's appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno last night. Robinson speaks with Fred Thompson about his candidacy for President of the Unites States and delves into the key issues facing America today, the politics of running for president, and the source of Thompson's conservative views. Turns out that Thompson is a movement conservative, inspired to become active in politics by the founder...

157,000 jobs added in May; U.S. unemployment rate steady at 4.5 percent

The nation's manufacturing sector showed surprising strength in April, growing at a faster-than-expected pace and pushing up prices for fuel, metals and corn-based products, a trade group said Tuesday. The Institute for Supply Management, based in Tempe, Ariz., said its manufacturing index registered 54.7, above the March reading of 50.9 and Wall Street's expectation of 51. It was the highest reading in 11 months, when it also registered 54.7. A reading above 50 indicates growth for the sector, while a reading below 50 indicates contraction. A sharp spike in the prices paid index fueled ongoing concerns over inflation and interest...

The British double agent Dusko Popov, who reputedly inspired Ian Fleming’s creation of James Bond, was approached by the Germans to become their spy. Popov did so, but reported everything he did to the British. When the Germans sent Popov to set up a large spy ring in the U.S., he was asked to gather some very provocative information for the Japanese. The Japanese request, called the "Japanese questionnaire," involved a lot of extremely specific information about Hawaii and Pearl Harbor. British Intelligence and Popov came to the conclusion in August of 1941 that the Japanese were preparing an invasion...

YUGOSLAVIA: FASCIST PROPAGANDA IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES TODAY William Dorich I personally took great exception to this unbridled racism since I lost 17 of my relatives during the Holocaust who were burned to death in a Serbian Orthodox church in the village of Vojnic in 1942 by Croatians and their Nazi Catholic priests. I lost the last 5 relatives of my name during Operation Storm in August of 1995 when 200,000 Serbs were "ethnically cleansed" from Croatia. My relatives were too old and too sick to flee. They were found a month later with their throats slit. Dateline 23rd February 2007...

Shortly after Thanksgiving I had dinner in California with Ronald Reagan's best biographer, Lou Cannon. Like many historians these days, we discussed whether George W. Bush is, conceivably, the worst U.S. president ever. Cannon bristled at the idea. Bush has two more years to leave his mark, he argued. What if there is a news flash that U.S. Special Forces have killed Osama bin Laden or that North Korea has renounced its nuclear program? What if a decade from now Iraq is a democracy and a statue of Bush is erected on Firdaus Square where that famously toppled one of...

Thursday October 12, 4:40 pm ET By , AP Business Writer Dow Ends Up 96 to Close at Record High of 11,948 on Earnings Optimism; Nasdaq Gains 38 NEW YORK (AP) -- The Dow Jones industrial average broke through 11,900 to close at a record high Thursday, boosted by optimism over the health of corporate earnings. According to preliminary calculations, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 95.57, or 0.81 percent, to 11,947.70. The previous record close from Tuesday was 11,867.17. The index's gain marked its fifth record close in two weeks. The intraday high set Thursday was 11,959.63, eclipsing an...

Led by a turnaround in manufacturing, the number of jobs in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre region hit its highest mark since the current method for counting jobs was created in 1990. Nonfarm jobs in the metropolitan statistical area hit 265,500, about 3,600 more than last year. As more Scranton/Wilkes-Barre residents found work, the region’s jobless rate fell four-tenths of a percentage point to a seasonally adjusted 5.1 percent in June, according to the state Department of Labor and Industry. Despite the decline in the area’s jobless rate, it remained greater than the state rate of 4.7 percent — also a 16-year record...

He was called the best stick-and-rudder pilot alive by legendary World War II Gen. Jimmy Doolittle. And legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager said Bob Hoover's the best pure pilot he ever met. But that's not what people want to talk to Hoover about when they meet him. They want to hear the story of how he stole that Fochwolf 190 fighter plane from the German airfield at the end of World War II after escaping from the Stalag Luft 1 POW camp, flying to freedom in Holland after 16 months in captivity. It's the stuff legends are made of, and...