This thread is boring me.

it's your thread.

the_slasher14:

First of all, the government certainly didn't "cause" the great depression, because it started under a laissez faire administration which had every opportunity to do, or not do, what needed to be done for almost four years. So please, don't embarrass yourself with the above tag line -- it isn't true and you know it.

Now, friend, try to think outside the box for a few moments. John Maynard Keynes claimed that the way to end the Depression was to pay men to dig holes and then to pay them to fill them in again. (He didn't mean this literally, of course. He was referring to "pump-priming" public works projects in general.) FDR tried some of this but it was politically impossible to do much of it. And, as anyone -- liberal or conservative -- will tell you, in the end it took WWII to end the Depression.

Now let me ask you: what is the difference between paying men to dig holes and then paying them to fill them in, and paying men to go get shot at, paying men to build ships, and paying men to build tanks and airplanes? Neither project adds much real WEALTH to society -- a tank is useful only as long as you're fighting a war, and nobody wants to fight wars forever. There are ancillary gains -- vastly better airplanes and nuclear energy, to name just two -- but these are things that a normally functioning capitalist society should produce in time anyhow.

The difference between WWII and FDR's "priming the pump" is precisely this -- the former was, after Pearl Harbor, politically acceptable; the latter was politically unacceptable even in the liberal atmosphere of the 1930s. Tha the government would raise taxes to unprecedented levels, would completely control the economy, and would borrow amounts of money unheard-of in our nation's history -- not even a President who won by the landslides FDR did could even dream of doing these things. He'd be told that this would ruin the economy -- you can't raise taxes in a DEPRESSION; you can't undertake massive borrowing without bankrupting the country; you can't stifle American initiative with a massive bureaucracy.

And yet, when these things HAD to be done to defeat Hitler and Tojo, all they did was to end the Depression, and launch a prosperity that lasted over a generation.

So you see, TTC, the problem was not that what FDR was doing wouldn't have worked -- we know it would have because when we HAD to try it on a large enough scale, it DID work. The problem was YOU, and the men like you of that time, who insisted that it wouldn't work, and as a result the Depression dragged on for a decade.

Nice try, but your whole post is just plain wrong. I shall try to cagegorize the ways.

1. The stock market crash caused a recession. These things happen from time to time in the market, I will grant you. The only thing that made that particular recession different than others before and after was the massive levels of government interference in the economy.

2. On the whole, FDR's idea to "prime the pump" through public works projects were mostly unobjectionable. The interventions that ruined the ecomomy were his price and wage fixing, attempts to nationalize utilities, the wholesale slaughter of "excess" agricultural animals that lead to shortages of food, and confisticatory tax rates on capital. The popular notion that all FDR wanted to do was put unemployed people to work building bridges and dams just ain't so.

3. Making planes, bombs, and bullets did not end the great depression. The destruction of Europe's industrial capacity by WWII opened up massive markets for american manufaturing at the end of the war. We essentially "exported" our depression to them, and it took them almost 30 years to recover from it.

To answer your points:

1. The stock market crash took place in late 1929. Herbert Hoover refrained from your "massive levels of government interference" for over three years, and the recession was still there, as bad as ever, in 1933 when FDR took over. You seem to be arguing that if FDR had done as little as Hoover had, everything would have been fine eventually. You have absolutely no evidence that indicates this is true, and in fact that Depression continued in every other country in the capitalist world -- those which tried government activism and those which did not. Indeed, it was only the huge military buildups in the years leading up to WWII that eventually began to defeat the Depression. I'm not saying that was a GOOD thing -- those buildups led to the bloodiest war in human history. But it underscores my point that "massive levels of government interference" DID end the Depression.

2. Most of what you're indicting FDR for here didn't take place until WWII started. The NRA was FDR's big shot at wage and price fixing, and the Supreme Court killed it before it did much. It didn't help the Depression while it was alive, and killing it didn't change much, either. I am aware that FDR did promote TVA and REA co-ops to bring electricity to places which had little of it. There's no evidence this did much either way, either -- how does bringing electrical energy to rural areas HURT the economy? I certainly won't argue with you about the slaughter of animals being a bad idea, except to point out that it was done with the blessing of most advocates of capitalism -- it was the left which was most outraged by it.

Finally, the initial increase in the top income tax rate (from 24% to 63%) took place under Hoover, not FDR, who held it there for four years and then advanced it to 78%. During the war, of course, it went even higher but by then the Depression was over and the tax was being used to...you know, win the war. Your case for FDR's confiscatory taxation being at fault is pretty weak, especially since the economy boomed during WWII when the top tax rate was 94%.

3. I pretty much agree with a lot of this, though it seems likely to me that the Depression would have ended even if Europe had somehow not destroyed itself during the war. After the war there were two things in abundance that always make for a business boom -- excess capital for investment (from profits made during the war years) and new inventions (advances in air travel, television, etc.) for consumers to buy. The postwar boom would not have been as big, and would not have lasted as long, without Europe's devastation and the rebuilding of it -- that's true. But the Depression ended DURING WWII, not afterwards, and would not have returned under any circumstances based upon American demand alone.

Altruistic style argumentatoin--or the CLAIM or reasoning,--was the government methodology in the oppression. Or the excuse for temporary horrors bringing about a better world. Your argument would have some more weight (not that its totally invalid in princinple on the "rules of the game" notions) if government half that time either confounded the problme, or likely IS often the problem. People in govenrment often work at cross purposes, because bureaucracy is itself is in the business of staying in business.

Ask anyone on the reveiving end of 'social work'....

I have been a Christian since aged 9. I know the confusion the New Testement causes, and filthy lucre in the old days was not generally private enterprise (indeed, such was limited to bare subsistence and growing food) and government was the chief way to make the "filth." Christ himself spoke more than once on the fairness of differing wages based on what was agreed upon. I don't hear some anti-capitalist screed on matters that are mostly spiritual in dimension. The anger of Christ to money changers and the rich of that time was the abuse of the temple and the dominion of power by Rome in essence.

Of course each of us can decide to abuse material wealth and not give or share time or whatnot, but it is a mistake to automatically conclude that since we have an industrial and post industrial framework, just because someone is wealthy does not automatically mean it falls into the same context as what we mentioned long ago. Having said that, yes, money can be a God in itself, but so can gluttony, sexual promiscuity, idolotry of Hollywood starlets, raw entertainment, and hatred.

Is something wrong with Obama's faith in Christ? Why did you think I would make a good writer for an impending Obama Liberation Theology administration? What makes any of us differ in Christ?

If you haven't read anything about corporate greed, wake up, it's out there and it has grown in philosophical circles to the point where it has it's own niche in our business culture. I wasn't addressing industrialization as a means of providing wealth, I can't imagine you got that from my post.

TheGeniusofAynRand:

I like to recommend Matt Ruff's Sewer, Gas, and Electric as a comic Rand-tidote. (It's been so long since I've read it--2004 must be a reprint--I should go back and see if it's as near amusing as I remember. He had the Empire State Building sustain a plane crash, if I recall, which can't go over so well these days.) Good stuff.

The Empire State Building did sustain a plane crash:

<link>

It was in 1945 -- a military plane lost in the fog, I believe. I can remember being in New York City that day at age three and being told about it by my mother.

1. Go look up some actual statistics. The economy was beginning to recover prior to FDR's reforms and subsequently re-collapsed. Unemployment was worse during the height of the new deal.

Please don't misunderstand. I'm not against any and all public works spending by the government. I'm talking about FDR's wage, price, and production controls.

2. The "left" that was opposed to FDR have nothing to do with the left in the country today. The term liberal historically referred to those who wanted to get the government out of the economic affairs of private citizens.

ing damage

<link>

Get it right folks!

You mean my mother lied to me!!!

OK. I "went and looked up some actual statistics" at this website: <link>, which says that the unemployment rate was 24% in 1932 (all numbers are rounded to two digits by me), 25% in 1933, when FDR took office in March, and then fell to 22%, 20%, 17%, and 14% in the four years that followed. It then rose to 19% in 1938, falling again in the next three years to 17% and 14% and 10%, whereafter the chart ends. I don't see how these numbers support your statement that the economy was in recovery before FDR's reforms, since most of them started very soon after he took office. I might accept your argument for 1934, perhaps, since it was still early in FDR's term, but the trend then went on for another three years, so if he was doing something wrong, it sure didn't show up in the numbers. I'm not sure what the 1938 spike is about but, again, if it was FDR's fault, why did the numbers resume their march downward again?

And, finally, FDR's big efforts at wage, price, and production controls took place in two major phases -- the NRA (June, 1933, to May, 1935, when the Supreme Court overturned it) and during the war. The former doesn't seem to have done anything BAD to the economy -- the unemployment rates show a pattern of dropping every year it existed and continued to do so for another two years after it was killed. As for the war years, unemployment dropped to virtually zero, as you know, so how were the wage and price and production controls a bad thing?

I'd say these numbers support my case a lot more than they support yours. Let's see YOUR numbers...

<link>

This article goes over the difference between the number employed and the unemployment rate.

Keep in mind also that the Unemployed would not consider the spouse in a household back then probably. Keeping in mind that problems with new statistics are that the definitions have been changed. Reagan had someone who was unemployed for more than so many months stricken from the official unemployed statistic. If we take into account all unemployed including those on welfare then we probably would come up with a larger number for today.

Don't blame Reagan for that -- those who are considered to have stopped seeking work have ALWAYS been dropped from the unemployment percentages, even though some if not most of them would indeed work if they weren't convinced there were no jobs available. It's a way the government has of trying to put the best face on things. And you're right, the REAL unemployment numbers are always significantly worse than the government numbers because of this.