How bad was the Great Depression? Over the four years from 1929 to 1933, production at the nation’s factories, mines and utilities fell by more than half. People’s real disposable incomes dropped 28 percent. Stock prices collapsed to one-tenth of their pre-crash height. The number of unemployed Americans rose from 1.6 million in 1929 to 12.8 million in 1933. One of every four workers was out of a job at the Depression’s nadir, and ugly rumors of revolt simmered for the first time since the Civil War. “The terror of the Great Crash has been the failure to explain it,” writes economist Alan Reynolds. “ People were left with the feeling that massive economic contractions could occur at any moment, without warning, without cause. That fear has been exploited ever since as the major justification for virtually unlimited federal intervention in economic affairs.”¹ Old myths never die; they just keep showing up in economics and political science textbooks. With only an occasional exception, it is there you will find what may be the 20th century’s greatest myth: Capitalism and the free-market economy were responsible for the Great Depression, and only government intervention brought about America’s economic recovery. April Fool

A Modern Fairy Tale:

According to this simplistic perspective, an important pillar of capitalism, the stock market, crashed and dragged in America to depression. President Herbert Hoover, an advocate of “hands-off,” or laissez-faire, economic policy, refused to use the power of government and conditions worsened as a result. It was up to Hoover’s successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to ride in on the white horse of government intervention and steer the nation toward recovery. The apparent lesson to be drawn is that capitalism cannot be trusted; government needs to take an active role in the economy to save us from inevitable decline.  But those who propagate this version of history might just as well top off their remarks by saying, “And Goldilocks found her way out of the forest, Dorothy made it from Oz back to Kansas, and Little Red Riding Hood won the New York State Lottery.” The popular account of the Depression as outlined above belongs in a book of fairy tales and not in a serious discussion of economic history.

THe GreAT, GreAT,GreAT,GreAT depression

To properly understand the events of the time, it is factually appropriate to view the Great Depression as not one, but four consecutive downturns rolled into one. These four “phases” are:

1. Monetary Policy and the Business. Cycle
   II. The Disintegration of the World Economy.
   III. The New Deal.
   IV. The Wagner Act.

The first phase covers why the crash of 1929 happened in the first place; the other three show how government intervention worsened it and kept the economy in a stupor for over a decade. Let’s consider each one in turn. . .

Read more . . . https://www.mackinac.org/archives/1998/sp1998-01.pdf

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