Top 3 Myths About the Great Depression and the New Deal

[123tim]

Just wondering what others thought of this video. I thought that it sounded pretty reasonable, but some of the comments on the page seem to indicate something opposite to my thinking.

(I have no idea if "Myth #1" is accurate - I'm pretty much economically illiterate.)



Comments copied from page:

Koch Brothers drivel.
cincyblows

cincyblows (1 hour ago)
Gee, that Eurotrash socialism is doing so well, as evidenced by the riots in Paris, London, and Greece. Capitalism rocks and socialism (Edit) sucks.
Prsthx

Prsthx (2 hours ago)
Hey. Who sponsors this channel?
SteveShaw008

SteveShaw008 (6 hours ago)
Harvard problems: 1. "Step back from excessive regulation?" U.S. neoliberalism of the last 25 years is exactly what permitted the current crisis [@2:54 is a rhetorical flourish and erroneous, i.e., "incentives created by gov't" rather than unregulated business led to current crisis]2. "The point of capitalism is to make sure businesses have to compete vigorously [i.e., an invisible hand]" ignores that inherent illogic of capitalism's logic: competitiveness necessarily leads to the concentration of wealth; capitalism necessarily demands a much--much--larger exploitable labor base than its capitalist class. 3. This guy, his office, clothes, books, and even ideas are only possible because of a vast dis/connected totality of exploitable labor.
onewhoseeks17

onewhoseeks17 (7 hours ago)
This message brought to you by the Grand Old Plutocracy.
cobrompton

cobrompton (7 hours ago)
(Edit) promoted videos. What corporations are paying for this (Edit)?
TunnelHack

TunnelHack (7 hours ago)
The base for the arguments here are not cited with verifiable facts, but the facts thrown out are not put together in a coherent fashion.

 

[RforRevolution]

(I have no idea if "Myth #1" is accurate - I'm pretty much economically illiterate.)

It's very accurate. FDR campaigned against Hoover as being too interventionist. In Hoovers own words:

"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. . . . For the first time in the history of depression, dividends, profits, and the cost of living, have been reduced before wages have suffered. . . . They were maintained until the cost of living had decreased and the profits had practically vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world.
Creating new jobs and giving to the whole system a new breath of life; nothing has ever been devised in our history which has done more for . . . "the common run of men and women." Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until we had found bottom. . . . We determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see the whole body of debtors of the United States brought to bankruptcy and the savings of our people brought to destruction."

Overall, the video is excellent especially debunking the myth that the war took us out of the depression.

 

[Napoleon's Shadow]

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal

by Dr. Robert P. Murphy of the Mises Institute


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