Posted by
Warner Todd Huston on Tuesday, October 07, 2008 11:13:48 PM
-By Warner Todd Huston
I have for years been saying that Franklin D. Roosevelt prolonged the Great Depression with his anti-capitalist, anti-American New Deal polices. Looks like some professors at UCLA agree with me.
"President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services," said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. "So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies."
Many people have been fooled by left-wing hortatory (or maybe whore-atory is closer) biographies for years. FDR was our savior, they claim. In truth, FDR was a failure in everything but the prosecution of the war. If there was no WWII FDR would have gone down in history as an utter failure.
FDR was the closest thing we've ever had to a socialist in the White House and has an utterly undeserved reputation. In any case his reputation for saving the economy is pure bunk.
"The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes," Cole said. "Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened."
I'm glad the university set are finally coming to the side of reality and truth on this at long last.