All Posts Tagged With: "FDR"
World War II Ended the Great Depression?
In his 2008 book, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, Paul Krugman writes: “The Great Depression in the United States was brought to an end by a massive deficit-financed public works program, known as World War II.”
He has since repeated this bon mot in a number of columns and television appearances. [...]
Art Needs No State Subsidies
It’s feeding time again, and artists and cultural groups are lining up at the trough. The bailout package approved by Congress in February threw another $50 million at the arts. For the better part of the past year, music impresario Quincy Jones beseeched Barack Obama to add a secretary of arts to his cabinet. In [...]
23Oct2009 | Bruce Edward Walker | 1 comment | ContinuedNew 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 | 1 comment | ContinuedWho Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush
There have now been many conservative and libertarian books covering the demise of American liberty under the U.S. Constitution, so if you don’t think you need to read another one, I understand.
Still, if that’s what you think, you’re wrong.
The latest entry in the genre, Thomas Woods and Kevin Gutzman’s Who Killed the Constitution?, is something [...]
FDR’s Lucky Timing
It’s not clear how any of FDR’s 1933 policies could have accounted for a 17 percent increase in GDP, even if they promoted expansion, because they wouldn’t have had time to ripple through the economy. It seems more likely that FDR had the good fortune to come into office near the bottom of the Depression, and enough adjustments in wages, prices, and other factors had occurred that the economy was ready to recover.
10Jun2009 | Jim Powell | 5 comments | ContinuedWhat is Seen and What is Unseen: Government “Job Creation”
How can Obama and his economic advisers know what kinds of jobs will position our economy to “lead the world” in the long term? Indeed, how can we expect anyone to know what kinds of jobs will be able to offer such a guarantee of wealth and security, considering the enormous complexity of our world?
10Jun2009 | Larissa Price | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Great Depression and World War II
What about World War II? Did it end the Great Depression? More generally, is war good for the economy? I answer both in the negative and borrow here from Ludwig von Mises: “War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.” As Higgs points out, because of the array of interventions in the wartime economy, war materiel was valued incorrectly and therefore the GDP data overstate economic conditions. Moreover, conscription and arms production gave a misleading employment picture
21May2009 | Art Carden | 5 comments | ContinuedThe Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn’t): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game
Alvin Felzenberg, like many thoughtful scholars, has a beef with the way historians have evaluated American presidents. Ever since 1948, the year of the first Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. poll, historians have ranked American presidents and published the results. In the case of Schlesinger’s poll, a select group of historians ranked all presidents (except for those [...]
24Apr2009 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedNews Flash: FDR Didn’t Restore Prosperity!
The New Deal did not end the Great Depression. This statement will come as no shock to Freeman readers, but it will to the many people who have never encountered it before. Now people are encountering it—in newspaper columns and news-talk shows.
Why, after years of being taught that Franklin Roosevelt’s economic intervention saved the country [...]
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 | 2 comments | ContinuedThe 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 | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Great Depression According to Milton Friedman
Ivan Pongracic, Jr. teaches economics at Hillsdale College. He extends special thanks to Lawrence H. White and Ivan Pongracic, Sr. for their helpful comments.
Few events in U.S. history can rival the Great Depression for its impact. The period from 1929 to 1941 saw fundamental changes in the landscape of American politics and economics, including such [...]
The Great Duration, 1929-41
Economists, following the usage of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their classic Monetary History of the United States, call the economic collapse between 1929 and 1933 the Great Contraction. In my own writings, I have added two similar terms to refer to other aspects of the Great Depression—the Great Duration and the Great Escape. [...]
1Jul2007 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Shortcomings of Government Charity
Jude Blanchette is a freelance writer living in China.
In their book, Myths of Rich and Poor, W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm observe, “Some part of human nature connects with the apocalyptic. Time and again, the pessimists among us have envisioned the world going straight to hell.” To be sure, “pessimists” apparently run most national [...]
Death by Public Works
Burton Folsom, Jr. is the Charles Kline Professor in History and Management at Hillsdale College. His book The Myth of the Robber Barons is in its fourth edition.
Almost all historians who write on the New Deal praise Franklin Roosevelt for using government to “solve” economic problems. Often, however, these historians only tell part of the [...]
Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelts America, Mussolinis Italy, and Hitlers Germany, 1933-1939
By Wolfgang Schivelbusch Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
1Jan2007 | agardner | 0 comments | ContinuedMonetary-Policy Disasters of the Twentieth Century
Kirby R. Cundiff is an associate professor of finance at Northeastern State University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an adjunct associate professor of finance at the University of Maryland University College.
The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913 and soon did what central banks almost always do: it started printing lots of money. During World War [...]
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
