It's 1873 and the Great Depression All Over Again
By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The model for our current economic crisis should be, economic historian Scott Reynolds Nelson writes, not the Great Crash of 1929 but the Great Depression of 1873. Read it, and see if you're not convinced. And thanks to Tyler Cowen, who linked to this on his Marginal Revolution blog. In another interesting post, Cowen argues that fiscal stimulus has never revived the macroeconomy, anywhere, anytime.
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Reader Comments
FDR saved capitalism
I'm a Depression Kid. I recall deprivations & how we "made do." FDR used taxes to make jobs in the CCC and public works jobs. In my area, neighbors aided others in a socialistic, sharing way. FDR was called a "traitor to his economic class," the owning class. If the Depression continued, i believe we would have advanced to public ownership of public utilities, transport and other daily needs. But along came the war and we were back to the neck in profiteering capitalism. We should demand more public ownership of natural resources and reverse bad decisions made during the Robber Baron era. At that time, Congress sold to private owners all the things that became daily necessities and we pay profits plus cost of operating them. The world "socialism" scares some folks but it simply means "we the people" own things.
Policies
Yea like bushes policies, the poor also must pay for. That is the story of history as it was in 1871-1914. The comments sound anti-obama but if we think about the poor paying anyway, we realize that these benefits that are necessary to keep food on the tables of the working class will eventually have to be paid back by the people.
I see no reason for arguments about overspending when the people who benefit are the ones paying back the money anyway.
Our system will never be accurate in the sense of benefit to humanity until there is a system accepted where basic needs of people are at the forefront of demand and economic policies are a second concern of the people. Until this happens revolution is unavoidable.
The general tone of Our Country regarding FDR remembering back over the 10 years or more since I read it, was positive but restrained. When I look at the economic performance of the 30's, I wonder how he got away with it, in the respect of having long maintained aura of economic savior in history books. So much recent analysis points to the policy mistakes that prolonged the depression, and FDR's dogma that apparently motivated it all, that excessive competition was to blame, is terrifying considering the coming ascendancy of the labor movement and Obama's Joe the Plumber dialogue. Did FDR's successful prosecution of WW II tend to so attenuate latter day criticism of him that his policies went unexamined? Did this set us up for the academic/ media enshrinement of leftist economic policy? I especially remember the theme of 60's-70's culture with regard to USSR : "We need to be more like them (economics) and they need to be more like us(personal liberties)." Because, to be honest, it looks like FDR's policies were loaded on the backs of the poor.
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