All Posts Tagged With: "New Deal"

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 Twisted Tree of Progressivism

Sorting out the Progressive movement and its constituent ideologies can be difficult in that the very term “progressive” is burdened with contested meanings. Rather than work along lines agreeable to presently out-of-office politicians hoping to regain power by denouncing long-dead Progressives, we begin with some deep background. One portent of Progressivism is found in the [...]

30Nov2011 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 24 comments | Continued

Unemployment: What’s To Be Done?

In Part 1 I outlined natural unemployment, government-caused unemployment, and the attempts to measure these. We saw how ambiguous and subjective some of the concepts of unemployment are and how the government, specifically the Federal Reserve, is charged with managing it. Now we turn to current conditions and what can be done about them. There [...]

30Nov2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 6 comments | Continued

The Infrastructure Delusion: Getting Nowhere Faster

Infrastructure does not an economy make. Highways and railroads, airports and seaports, communications towers and fiber-optic cables are essential for the flow of commerce, but it is the people, goods, and information moving over and through this infrastructure that are the heart of an economy. Overinvestment in roads, bridges, and airports means underinvestment in the [...]

26Oct2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 12 comments | Continued

What 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 | Continued

The Struggle to Limit Government: A Modern Political History

Today’s most crucial policy battles are about federal spending and the scope of government power. Cato Institute scholar John Samples reminds us in this book that those battles have their origins in the Progressive era, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Early in the twentieth century Herbert Croly (cofounder of The New Republic) argued [...]

24Aug2011 | Greg Kaza | 0 comments | Continued

The Modern Union versus Workers’ Rights

The raging controversy in Wisconsin over eliminating collective bargaining “rights” for government employees cast a bright and harsh light on public-sector unions. Some commentators have distinguished public-sector unions from private-sector unions, but the vested interests of the two are much the same. Both are expressions of what might be called “the modern union,” which came [...]

22Jun2011 | Wendy McElroy | 4 comments | Continued

The Day FEE Was Called before Congress

In 1950 Leonard E. Read faced one of the most difficult challenges of his life as he prepared to appear before a hostile congressional committee. His friend W. C. Mullendore warned that the committee was out to destroy him: “You should be under no illusion whatever but that the intention is to smear and not look [...]

24Feb2011 | David T. Beito | 2 comments | Continued

The 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 | Continued

For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s

The latest New Deal synthesis is For the Survival of Democracy by veteran historian Alonzo Hamby of Ohio University. What makes Hamby’s research design different is that he describes the development of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal in an international context. Specifically, he weaves the American narrative with events in Britain and Germany in [...]

8Jul2010 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 0 comments | Continued

FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression

The Great Depression of the 1930s was by far the greatest economic calamity in U.S. history. In 1931, the year before Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, unemployment in the United States had soared to an unprecedented 16.3 percent. In human terms that meant that over eight million Americans who wanted jobs could not find them. [...]

6Jul2010 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 2 comments | Continued

Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America

History buffs who focus on the world between the wars will find plenty to ponder in Adam Cohen’s Nothing to Fear. Openly critical books–from The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn (1948) to FDR’s Folly by Jim Powell (2003)–have laid bare the politics and economics of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, showing us how not to [...]

20Apr2010 | Roger W. Garrison | 3 comments | Continued

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, [...]

24Mar2010 | Jim Powell | 3 comments | Continued

A Contemptible Congress and a Derelict Court

What can Congress do that the Supreme Court would find unconstitutional? Or, what can Congress do that a president would veto as unconstitutional? It is not much exaggeration to say that Congress can do whatever it can muster a majority vote for, whether it is constitutional or not. The members only have to worry about [...]

24Feb2010 | Walter E. Williams | 5 comments | Continued

What Ended the Great Depression?

What finally ended the Great Depression? That question may be the most important in economic history. If we can answer it, we can better grasp what perpetuates economic stagnation and what cures it. The Great Depression was the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. From 1931 to 1940 unemployment was always in double digits. In [...]

24Feb2010 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 43 comments | Continued

Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal

“He who wants to improve conditions must propagate a new mentality, not merely a new institution.” –Ludwig von Mises, New York Times, January 1942 Invisible Hands by Kim Phillips-Fein, professor of American history at New York University’s Gallatin School, is a well-researched and thorough account of resistance to government economic domination. It’s also a veritable [...]

24Feb2010 | Bettina Bien Greaves | 3 comments | Continued

Losing the FDIC

“In the darkest days of the financial crisis a year ago, Sheila Bair was hailed for having predicted the housing bust. Today, the chief of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is fighting for her agency’s future. “The FDIC was set up in 1933 as part of a successful attempt to rescue the banking system, and [...]

18Dec2009 | Mike Van Winkle | 0 comments | Continued
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