Archive for Robert Higgs

Robert Higgs is senior fellow at the Independent Institute, editor of The Independent Review, and author of Delusions of Power (Independent Institute).

Regime Uncertainty, Then and Now

In a 1997 article, “Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War”, I advanced the idea of regime uncertainty in an attempt to improve our understanding of the Great Depression’s extraordinary duration and of the highly successful postwar transition to a genuinely prosperous market-oriented economy. The idea [...]

4Jan2012 | Robert Higgs | 4 comments | Continued

The Great Society’s War on Poverty

For the most part President Lyndon B. Johnson was simply lucky in regard to economic stability and growth during his term in office, although he does deserve credit for pushing John F. Kennedy’s stalled tax-cut proposal to quick enactment in February 1964. The economy was already growing and the rate of unemployment declining when LBJ [...]

21Sep2011 | Robert Higgs | 7 comments | Continued

The Myth of U.S. Prosperity during World War II

World War II, the so-called Good War, has been a fount of historical fallacies. One of the greatest—and one of the most pernicious for subsequent policymakers—is the notion that prosperity prevailed during the war. Although Americans might have been dying in the Pacific and European theaters of war, people on the home front actually benefited [...]

8Sep2011 | Robert Higgs | 2 comments | Continued

Economic Analysis and the Great Society

Although the Great Society should be understood as primarily a political phenomenon—a vast conglomeration of government policies and actions based on political stances and objectives—economists and economic analysis played important supporting roles in the overall drama. Even when political actors could not have cared less about economic analysis, they were usually at pains to cloak [...]

25May2011 | Robert Higgs | 5 comments | Continued

Ideological and Political Underpinnings of the Great Society

The surge of federal economic interventions that occurred during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency—the much-ballyhooed Great Society, whose centerpiece was the War on Poverty—differed from the four preceding surges, each of which had been sparked by war or economic depression. No national emergency prevailed when Johnson took office following John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, [...]

24Feb2011 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | Continued

America’s Depression within a Depression, 1937–39

The Great Depression in the United States is generally dated as beginning in 1929 and ending in 1941, give or take a year. This has led many commentators to disregard or to pass quickly over the serious depression that began in 1937 and ended—if returning to the 1937 level can be considered a depression’s end—in [...]

22Oct2010 | Robert Higgs | 8 comments | Continued

Foreign Lenders: Friends Indeed to a U.S. Treasury in Need

When the U.S. government wishes to spend more money than it receives as tax revenue, it covers the shortfall by borrowing, and foreign lenders have become increasingly important sources of such borrowed funds. Reliance on foreign lenders is as old as the republic. Indeed, loans from the French and the Dutch proved critical in keeping [...]

29Jun2010 | Robert Higgs | 2 comments | Continued

Private Capital Consumption: Another Downside of the Wartime “Miracle of Production”

Although the so-called miracle of production in the United States during World War II persuaded many economists and others to accept the validity of the basic Keynesian model, this interpretation rests on important errors of commission and omission to which I have called attention over the years. (See especially the studies brought together in my [...]

24Mar2010 | Robert Higgs | 3 comments | Continued

Ten Reasons Not to Abolish Slavery

Slavery existed for thousands of years, in all sorts of societies and all parts of the world. To imagine human social life without it required an extraordinary effort. Yet, from time to time, eccentrics emerged to oppose it, most of them arguing that slavery is a moral monstrosity and therefore people should get rid of [...]

18Nov2009 | Robert Higgs | 98 comments | Continued

The Rise of Big Business and the Growth of Government

Most people learn about the relation between the rise of big business and the growth of government in the form of what amounts to a morality play. In the most widely disseminated version, presented in nearly every American history textbook, the emergence of big business (playing the role of the devil) is said to have [...]

19Aug2009 | Robert Higgs | 28 comments | Continued

New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America

Not everyone loved President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even in 1936, when he enjoyed his most lopsided electoral victory, almost 17 million voters cast their ballots for Alf Landon. During Roosevelt’s long presidency, he attracted vigorous literary critics, such as H. L. Mencken, John T. Flynn, and Garet Garrett. But the winners write the history, and [...]

19Aug2009 | Robert Higgs | 3 comments | Continued

Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”

As a soldier, politician, and writer, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874–1965) made a deep imprint on world history for more than half a century. He is best known for rallying his countrymen during the fateful Battle of Britain when he was prime minister—thereby, many people believe, stemming the flood that was sweeping Adolf Hitler to [...]

11Jun2009 | Robert Higgs | 71 comments | Continued

The Two-Price System: U.S. Rationing During World War II

As the United States mobilized for war after mid-1940, the government’s demands for munitions and related resources began to put pressure on certain markets, and soon prices began to rise. In 1941 they rose faster: from December 1940 to December 1941, the producer price index increased by 17 percent, the consumer price index by 10 [...]

24Apr2009 | Robert Higgs | 5 comments | Continued

Nixon’s New Economic Plan

Richard Nixon had a crisis mentality. In 1962, unhappily out of public office, he wrote an autobiographical account entitled Six Crises. Whereas some presidents have faced real crises, however, Nixon’s were more the product of his personal sense of siege. As president he twice declared a state of national emergency, first on March 23, 1970, [...]

20Jan2009 | Robert Higgs | 2 comments | Continued

The Great Escape from the Great Depression

Questions about the Great Depression may be usefully framed as pertaining to three distinct issues: the Great Contraction, the extraordinarily severe economic decline from 1929 to 1933; the Great Duration, the persistence of subpar economic performance for more than a decade; and the Great Escape, the ultimate recovery from this uniquely deep and long depression. [...]

1Oct2008 | Robert Higgs | 5 comments | Continued

Construction Boom and Bust Between the World Wars

Imagine a story about collapse of the real-estate markets that states: “Most of the millions piled up in paper profits had melted away, many of the millions sunk in developments had been sunk for good and all, the vast inverted pyramid of credit had toppled to earth, and the lesson of the economic falsity of [...]

1Jun2008 | Robert Higgs | 2 comments | Continued

The New Deal and the State and Local Governments

Until the twentieth century the average American in peacetime had little contact with the federal government, except for the post office, and the federal government’s policies and actions affected most people only indirectly—for example, through land-disposition policies or the tariff’s effect on commodity prices. State and local governments provided nearly all the government services the [...]

1Mar2008 | Robert Higgs | 5 comments | Continued
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