Thursday, December 19, 2013

Leftist Revisionism Run Amok

If a Democratic President had instituted policies which immediately coincided with a rapid reduction in the unemployment rate from 12% to 2%, partisan leftists would have demanded that this individual be glorified as a superior President. But because it was a Republican President (Warren Harding, 1921) who did these things, not only is he not being given credit for it by these idiots, he's also being blamed for causing the Great Depression TEN YEARS SUBSEQUENT (private citizens being allowed to keep more of their own private property causes depressions, we're led to believe - watch it, Singapore, you people must be on the verge of a dandy!)...................................................................................And it's all so completely ignorant, too. Anybody who knows anything about economics and history knows that the Great Depression was largely brought about by an absolutely incompetent Federal Reserve policy (both in the years leading up to and also in the aftermath), European countries reneging on their war debt, and a world-wide deflationary policy relative to the gold standard, and so to even attempt to blame it on Harding is full-bore idiocy (yes, the top 5%'s share of the total income rose from 1920 to 1929 but only from 25.47% to 26.09% AND consumption as a percentage of GDP had actually RISEN from 68% to 75% - statistics courtesy of economic historians Burton Folsom, Thomas B. Silver, Peter Temin, and Gene Smiley)...................................................................................P.S. The 1920s was actually a decade of overconsumption rather than underconsumption. To quote specifically Professor Temin here (from MIT), "The concept of underconsumption has been abandoned in modern discussions of macroeconomics....The ratio of consumption to national income was not falling in the 1920s. An underconsumptionist view of the 1920s, therefore, is untenable." Case closed.

6 comments:

dmarks said...

Don't forget protectionism as a major cause for making the Depression a lot worse.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

Yes, and price supports, unit banking laws, crazy-assed spending policies, draconian tax increases, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation which was essentially a bailout entity, etc.. Yes, we had an economic downturn and, yes, the government policies of Hoover and FDR made it much worse.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

And the assertion (by the leftists), WD, was that it was UNDERconsumption by the masses that caused Great Depression. That is their theory. And, while, yes, we did have a bubble, that bubble was not caused by private citizens keeping more of their own private property. It was caused by the Federal Reserve and its ridiculously stupid easy money policy (they of course compounded the problem by overly restricting the money supply after the crash).......And even then the economy was actually improving in 1930 and it wasn't until President Hoover (a progressive) started messing with the markets that the bottom truly fell out.

Joe "Truth 101" Kelly said...

You fool! Harding and Clinton were great economically not because of bubbles or freedom stuff, but because they fooled around.

God I have to straighten you people out on everything.

Raise your game Will. I thought you had a degree in history or something.

Les Carpenter said...

Protectionism...Outsourcing/Off-shoring then importing, someday we'll find that global balance that is just right. Nobody learns from history and the damn game keeps changing anyway.

Ya might be on to something there Joe... Maybe Obama should start fooling around? Oh that's right, he has been for 5 years and it doesn't seem to be working so well for him.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

He absolutely may be on to something. And, yes, I would add Kennedy to the list ("Happy birthday, Mr. President") as well.