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 [...]

Walter 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 [...]

FDR’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.

Shakedown: 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 [...]

Comparing 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, [...]

Herbert 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, [...]

Mainstream 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.

America’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

Death 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 [...]