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UCLA Economists' Warning To Be Completely Ignored
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A pair of UCLA economists calculate that Franklin Roosevelt's policies extended the Great Depression by 7 years - more than half of its total run in America.
This is not actually groundbreaking news; over 40 years ago, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz showed that tight monetary policy is likely the cause of why a bubble-induced reception turned into the worst economic disaster in our history. (Ben Bernanke - Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors - is trying to keep the money supply liquid.)
Basically, Friedman (who was something of a Keynsian at the time), and Schwartz were piling up mountains of data on the Depression when patterns emerged that were contrary to the Keynesian orthodoxy. They found that the tightening of the money supply was the actual cause of the Depression's depth and length.
But research by UCLA's Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian appears to show that New Deal legislative policies own no small share of the blame.
"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. ... The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies."
... the New Deal policies short-circuited the market's self-correcting forces."
Hmmm... Progressive demagoguery of markets along with social policies undermining the market's ability to identify pricing signals and correct for them? That sounds awfully like the situation we're in now.
Thankfully both of our Presidential candidates are adamantly opposed to using the State to protect labor unions, raise prices, punish business, flood different and fairly random sectors of the economy with money taxed from Peter, regulate industries and clamp down on free trade, all the while encouraging a reckless immigration policy that could well end up pushing millions of people into destitution. Can you get The Grapes of Wrath en español?
Oh, wait. Did I say opposed? No. I meant McCain's for a quarter of that and Obama is champing at the bit to pull the economy into the municipal dump of Progressive dreams.
Ha! America will have its comeuppance! Sure, it doesn't make Socialism work any better. But it does make America worse off. And isn't that something?
What do you expect? It's nurture – he's just sticking to the lessons taught to him by every influential person in his life (they're all Socialists). It's all he knows. Look at his litigation and voting records.
Barack Obama: Hope. Change. Bread lines.
Is Sam's Club still open? I hear they have great prices on sacks of pinto beans. I can store them in my basement next to the cases of Valu-Rite.
