All Posts Tagged With: "Herbert Hoover"
The First Government Bailouts: The Story of the RFC
The idea of using federal money to bail out large failing corporations did not begin with the Bush administration. In the beginning was the RFC, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which President Herbert Hoover pretentiously named and bountifully funded during the Great Depression to bail out corporations deemed too big to fail. In 1932 Congress gave [...]
30Nov2011 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 1 comment | ContinuedLet Sleeping Failures Lie: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation
The most fallacious argument for an RFC is that it can provide capital when there is a shortage. Obviously, the government has no capital of its own.
21Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | ContinuedWalter Lippmann: The Impossibilities of Social Planning
At the beginning of the twentieth century, observed historian A. J. P. Taylor, a law-abiding Englishman’s conscious relations with the government were limited to his contacts with the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked, and if he wanted to travel abroad he could do so without [...]
21Sep2011 | Harold B. Jones Jr. | 2 comments | ContinuedWhat Do We Mean by “Big Government”?
The scale of government matters, but we cannot get so tangled up in debates about the size of federal government expenditures that we overlook the effects of changes in the scope of government power.
25Aug2011 | Steven Horwitz | 6 comments | ContinuedFDR’s Advisers Knew What Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman Don’t
Hoover can be blamed for turning what would have likely been a severe but short market correction into a deep and long Great Depression. The reason, however, is not that Hoover did nothing.
18Aug2011 | Steven Horwitz | 46 comments | ContinuedPrivate Investment and Public “Investment”
Politicians are fond of telling the public that we must “invest” in this program or that—be it education; health care; make-work infrastructure projects like the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere”; $50 million for an indoor rainforest in Iowa; $3.4 million for a tunnel to allow turtles to cross under a highway in Florida; $1.8 million for swine [...]
22Jun2011 | Adam B. Summers | 1 comment | ContinuedShakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy against the American Taxpayer
Politics has one feature that sets it apart from all sorts of voluntary action: It employs coercion. Politicians can raid the wallets of taxpayers, forcing them to part with money they would rather spend, donate, or invest according to their own desires. Much of the money thus confiscated is then spent to succor special-interest groups [...]
22Jun2011 | George C. Leef | 5 comments | ContinuedThe Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal
The Great Depression ranks as one of the most misunderstood periods of history. For that, we can thank biased historians who for generations have favored activist government, along with Keynesian economists who never understood how the economy works. Since the last few months of 2008, the Great Depression has been thrust back into the national debate [...]
22Dec2010 | Raymond J. Keating | 3 comments | ContinuedComparing the Great Depression to the Great Recession
President Obama has often remarked that the Great Recession (2008–10) is the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. It’s interesting to study the many parallels between the Great Recession and the Great Depression. Causation. The main causes of both crises lie in actions of the federal government. In the case of the Great Depression, [...]
20May2010 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 47 comments | ContinuedThe 1932 Bait-and-Switch
Harry Truman once said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” That observation applies especially well to what tens of millions of Americans have been taught about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the man under whom Truman served as vice president for about a month. Recent scholarship (including a highly acclaimed [...]
20May2010 | Lawrence W. Reed | 7 comments | ContinuedHerbert Hoover
William E. Leuchtenburg is among the last surviving literary lions who played a major role shaping the reputation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His book Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963) stood out amidst the postwar deluge of worshipful works about FDR, including those by James MacGregor Burns, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Frank Freidel, [...]
24Mar2010 | Jim Powell | 3 comments | ContinuedThe Depression You’ve Never Heard Of: 1920-1921
When it comes to diagnosing the causes of the Great Depression and prescribing cures for our present recession, the pundits and economists from the biggest schools typically argue about two different types of intervention. Big-government Keynesians, such as Paul Krugman, argue for massive fiscal stimulus—that is, huge budget deficits—to fill the gap in aggregate demand. [...]
18Nov2009 | Robert P. Murphy | 73 comments | ContinuedMainstream Macro in an Austrian Nutshell
While the events that have unfolded over the past year have required some outside-the-box theorizing by mainstream macroeconomists, the econo-mists of the Austrian school can offer a straightforward, fill-in-the-blanks explanation by drawing on the theory first articulated by Ludwig von Mises and then developed by Friedrich A. Hayek.
24Apr2009 | Roger W. Garrison | 15 comments | ContinuedShame on You, Paul Krugman
We are certainly used to the fallacious Keynesian “economics” that pours forth from most of Paul Krugman’s New York Times columns. That’s bad enough. But dishonesty too? What’s the excuse for that? In a recent column called “Fifty Herbert Hoovers,” Krugman expressed fear that the nation’s governors would follow in the footsteps of Hoover, with [...]
5Jan2009 | Sheldon Richman | 7 comments | ContinuedAmerica’s Engineer
No president is more despised by opponents of big government than Franklin
Delano Roosevelt. His New Deal is singularly blamed for introducing large-scale national economic
intervention to the United States. But FDR did not drop from the sky. He emerged in a particular
context that was shaped by his predecessors, without whom we might have never heard
his name. His immediate predecessor of course was Herbert Hoover, the one-term
Republican elected in 1928 who had the misfortune to be in office only several
months when the stock market crashed. History has treated Hoover curiously. His
enemies see him as the heartless leader who stood by as the population was
ravaged by the Great Depression. His admirers see him as the last lion of laissez -faire individualism, valiantly resisting the tide of statism that washed over
America in the 1930s. Both pictures are grotesque distortions of reality driven
by political interest. More . . .
A NEW article by Sheldon Richman
22Jun2007 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Great Contraction, 1929–33
The recession that began in mid-1929 need not have become a disaster. Many downturns had occurred previously in U.S. economic history, and nearly all of them had been fairly shallow and soon followed by recovery and continued growth. In the nineteenth century most people had believed that the government neither knew how nor possessed the [...]
1Apr2007 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedDeath by Public Works
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 story. One example is Roosevelt’s vast public-works program. Here most historians wax eloquent on the dams built by TVA, the roads built by WPA, and the bridges [...]
1Mar2007 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 1 comment | Continued-
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