From The Great Depression Department of Duh

[alexamenos]

FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

"Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump," said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA's Department of Economics. "We found that a relapse isn't likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies."

The learned gentlemen from UCLA may be quite astute to actually examine the effects of Franklin Bush Roosevelt, but they could really bone up on their reading a bit. It's been no mystery at all to plenty of others, including the inestimable Murry Rothbard, that the government interventions of the 30's were silly and disastrous.

The common narrative goes something like this -- Herbert Hoover, the last "do-nothing, laissez faire" President, failed to correct the failings of capitalism and thus it was onto FDR's New Deal to correct the matter (or slightly more fashionable, it was up to WWII to get us out of that mess).

Nonsense...Herbert Hoover was a small government Laissez Faire type like George Delano Bush is a small government Laissez Faire type....he was a "compassionate conservative" before big government conservatism wasthought to have existed. Sez Hoover at the end of his term in '32 about efforts to cure the depression:

We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action.... No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such times....

Hoover started the New Deal, it just didn't have a name at the time. What FDR did was expand upon Hoovers destructive interventions, deepening a bad problem. This is not unknown, just under- publicized.

[Arne]

Thank you for pointing out the obvious. However, massive government intervention will always be the cure that the mainstream media and their favorite politicians advocate. There's no way to stop them.