After we start a War of perverse cost and motivation. After we brow-beat unions with $75/hr bullshit. Let us at long last remind the United States of Lemmings that FDR was Evil and Ronald Reagan proceedeth from the right hand of the father
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Go here....
http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/cm20030124ar03p1.htm
These are the unemployment rates during the Great Depression as published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Government.
Year and Percentage
1923-29 3.3
1930 8.9
1931 15.9
1932 23.6
1933 24.9
1934 21.7
1935 20.1
1936 17.0
1937 14.3
1938 19.0
1939 17.2
1940 14.6
1941 9.9
1942 4.7
Roosevelt's NRA did not work too well, did it? Note the "double dip" from 1937 to 1939. We can blame 1932 to 1933-1934 on Hoover but that latter period? No way.
Does this mean that today's liberals are "all wrong" and the neo-Cons are right? Nope.
Let's not pretend that the "New Deal" was that wonderful. It sucked because Roosevelt played political games rather than take care of the people.
Bill
thanks for your entry Bill.
There where many inefficiencies and worse unconstitutionalities (packing supreme court,violation of civil liberties of Japanese Americans)of the FDR administration. The unemploy stats you site are not to be dismissed, but to the intangibles of the situation, i had hundreds of calls out at Jeanette from those who participated in WPA programs, especially the CC camps, who found great spiritual value from having productive work to do. Many state parks and gamelands still have the tree plantings and stoneworks errected by these workers, it gave them pride and a sense of accomplishment. We pray God will spare us from similar circumstance today.Welcome aboard!
The mythos of the Great Depression was that Hoover started it and Roosevelt ended it. This is a dangerous myth because it encourages emulation.
Nobody talks about cheap 'n easy credit during the 1920s, about rampant speculation, and about how some insiders rigged the market and made out like bandits from the crash.
The Federal Reserve was supposed to prevent "panics". Instead it created one in 1929 with easy money and then prolonged one with weird over reactions to inflation.
Nobody blamed the Fed. Nobody blamed the irrational exuberance of common folks playing the stock market with their life savings.
The myth was that Roosevelt had to "rein in capitalism". Just like Obama has to rein in capitalism. It's a crock of shit. Bush is no laissez faire President, proof of which was Sarbanes Oxley.
Roosevelt's non-sense under the NRA forced investments into bizarre directions. He distorted markets. He displaced people into the WPA and CCC, where they worked for peanuts on public works, learned few marketable skills and did not learn to compete and satisfy customer demand.
Packing the Supreme Court and carting off Japanese to camps was trivial in comparison to these distortions and disruptions of prices and wages. Mainly because they resulted in double digit unemployment rates, starved people and resulted in hardship for almost everyone.
Roosevelt stole the gold dollar, replacing it with a fiat currency. All the better to pay for his programs and subsequent war. Historically people feared fiat currencies for this reason, because it empowered ruthless people to run off with everyone's money.
We got the Wagner Act out of it. We also got Social Security.
In exchange for these benefits we got a continuous state of war from 1948 until 1989, with a brief break until 2001. We lived under the threat of doomsday the whole damn time. We may have lost a President directly to it and two more might have quit rather than face the Dealey plaza treatment.
How many of your generation died in Viet Nam? What did they die for Claire? So Vietnamese could make cheap shoes and clothing?
Obama is going to do what Roosevelt, the Communists, and Fascists could not do? Control the economy and give people jobs? Nope. Cannot be done.
Frederick von Hayek won a Nobel Prize for economics. Precisely because the Committee liked his ideas on Limits of Knowledge. His speech can be seen here.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html
Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize does not cancel out von Hayek's work. Might refine it but not cancel it out.
Bill
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