I am shocked, shocked, to find out Krugman was wrong...

Raoul_Luke said:

You assume that "helping" our "workers stay on the job and our children stay in school, etc." is their real objective. They could not care less about that. All they care about is "helping" government take over ever bigger swaths of the economy.

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Raoul_Luke said:

Firstly, Morgantau was FDR's Treasury Secretary and Scott Baio, well, wasn't. But wait, there's more - of course if FDR had done "nothing" the depression would have ended before it ever got going:

https://mises.org/library/forgotten-depression-1920

And as for WWII "ending the Great Depression," well, LOL! Certainly if you have a bad employment deficit, killing off a half million young men (and women) would "help." But beyond that, the idea that WWII "ended" the Great Depression is absurd:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/11/30/the-great-depression-was-ended-by-the-end-of-world-war-ii-not-the-start-of-it/

https://mises.org/library/world-war-ii-did-not-end-great-depression

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/24563084.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-world-war-ii/

https://www.corbettreport.com/no-wwii-did-not-end-the-great-depression/

And LOL, YOUR final link actually destroys your "point:"

On the surface, World War II seems to mark the end of the Great Depression. During the war more than 12 million Americans were sent into the military, and a similar number toiled in defense-related jobs. Those war jobs seemingly took care of the 17 million unemployed in 1939. Most historians have therefore cited the massive spending during wartime as the event that ended the Great Depression.

Some economists—especially Robert Higgs (seehttp://www.independent.org/store/book.asp?id=65) -- have wisely challenged that conclusion. Let’s be blunt. If the recipe for economic recovery is putting tens of millions of people in defense plants or military marches, then having them make or drop bombs on our enemies overseas, the value of world peace is called into question. In truth, building tanks and feeding soldiers—necessary as it was to winning the war—became a crushing financial burden. We merely traded debt for unemployment. The expense of funding World War II hiked the national debt from $49 billion in 1941 to almost $260 billion in 1945. In other words, the war had only postponed the issue of recovery.

https://fee.org/articles/37-if-fdrs-new-deal-didnt-end-the-depression-then-it-was-world-war-ii-that-did/

That there is some delicious irony, am I right?

War is the ultimate Broken Window Fallacy:

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/63/Broken-Window-Fallacy

http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

As I have always said (and you once again prove correct here), war is the last refuge of failed Keynesians...

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EatTheRich said:

No “of course” about it. 1920 was atypical and what worked then was tried many other times and failed.

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Raoul_Luke said:

That is absurd propaganda (and complete conjecture, by the way).

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Nutty Cortez said:

Thanks for proving what I said. Obama nearly added 10 trillion to the debt.

More than any President.

Any questions ?

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EatTheRich said:

1837=first MAJOR failure of laissez-faire policy in the U.S.

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Raoul_Luke said:

LOL! As if:

View attachment 43303

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-ushistory/chapter/the-van-buren-administration/

Where does it say "free markets failed" in there?

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EatTheRich said:

Withdrawing federal despises from the national bank=forcing them to rely on markets, not government largesse, for success.

Refusing to renew the bank charter=fighting central banking which is hated by every free market ideologist.

Specie circular=a gold standard

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Raoul_Luke said:

So intervening in markets and then withdrawing the interventions is a "failure of the free markets?" That is absurd!

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EatTheRich said:

Without the intervention the economy and the country would never have gotten off the ground. Which is why it happened without opposition ... up to the point when the intervention created a strong enough economy that the rich could make a profit by “withdrawing the intervention” and engineering a depression.

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