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"...
regarding the Great
Depression: You're right, we
did it."-- what Federal
Reserve Board Governor (before
he was Chairman) Ben Bernanke
finally said to Nobel Laureate
Dr. Milton Friedman on
Milton's 90th birthday,
meaning that yes, indeed,
the Great Depression WAS
caused by, AND prolonged by,
THE GOVERNMENT,-as Friedman
had always said.[Financial
Review, 12-9-2002]
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See: "Obama threatens to
follow in FDR's economic missteps"-HERE,
"Two UCLA
economists say they have figured out
why the Great Depression dragged on
for almost 15 years..." HERE, "The New Deal Hurt the
Economy" HERE, and the
Burton Folsom speech on the Great
Depression-HERE-
Also
see:The
Forgotten
Man: A New History of the Great
Depression-HERE,-
"The
New Deal Myth" HERE, Rethinking the Great
DepressionHERE,
Forgotten
Lessons-HERE, The
P.C. Guide to the Great Depression
HERE,
Essays
on the Great DepressionHERE, America's Great
Depression HERE,-
the audio lecture,-The Cause and Consequence
of the Great Depression (CD)
HERE,
Did capitalism cause the Great
Depression?
HERE,
Putting it in Perspective HERE,
-
The
Roosevelt Myth-HERE,
FDR's
Folly:
How Roosevelt and His
New Deal Prolonged the Great
Depression--by Jim Powell
HERE, and
New
Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic
Legacy Has Damaged America HERE.
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HERE
"Scratch
the
surface of an endemic problem --
famine, illness, poverty --
and you invariably find a
politician at the source."
-- Simon Carr, in
his review of The Mystery of
Capital by Hernando de
Soto
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"There is no need here to
attempt to explain FDR's economic
reasoning, if such an explanation is even
possible. Speaking of the President's
acquaintance with economics, biographer
John T. Flynn noted that 'it is entirely
possible that no one knew less about
that subject than Roosevelt.' [from
The
Roosevelt
Myth] What is important
is that these economic fallacies would
have terrible consequences. The
President's faulty grasp of what had
caused the Depression led him to introduce
a system whose operation was quite similar
to the old guild structure, with the
explicit intention of reducing
competition." -- Thomas E. Woods, Jr.,-HERE
[By
contrast, RWR,
the only president to ever hold a
degree in economics, came
into office with a wildly inflationary
recession on his hands in 1981 and, by
enacting policies the polar opposite of
FDR's, sparked the longest boom in
American history, despite having to carry
with it the continuation of the poisonous
Community Re-investment Act as an ongoing
legacy from his predecessor, a ticking
time-bomb that would eventually explode as
the financial crisis of 2008.] |
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"During the Great
Depression, economics had been taken by storm by
the British savant John Maynard Keynes. He
diagnosed the Depression as a failure of
"aggregate demand," and prescribed massive
government spending to stimulate it back to
life. This became the dominant paradigm
that guided the New Deal and captured the
economics profession for decades after.
For economics, this was a plunge into what
amounts to a dark age. It was as though
crisis had erased a century and a half of the
economics of reason guided by the enlightened
thinking of great minds like Adam Smith.
[Dr. Milton] Friedman's greatest contribution
would be a monumental empirical investigation
that would prove -- not just argue, but prove --
that the Keynesian diagnosis of, and
prescription for, the Depression was in
error."
-- Donald Luskin and Andrew Greta in "The
Economist of Liberty": Chapter 9 of I
Am John Galt |
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"Bad and
discredited ideas, it seems, never die.
Neither do they fade away. Instead, they
keep turning up, like bad pennies or Godzilla
in the old Japanese movies." -- Murray
N.
Rothbard
.
"One
of the most important reasons for studying
history is that virtually every stupid idea
that is in vogue today has been tried before
and proved disastrous before, time and
again." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
.
"There is no error so monstrous that
it fails to find defenders among the ablest men."
-- Prof. John E. E. D. Acton
.
"The study of history is a
powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance.
It is humbling to discover how many of our
glib assumptions, which seem to us noble and
plausible, have been tested before, not once
but many times and in innumerable guises; and
discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly
false." -- Celebrated Historian Paul
Johnson
.
"Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it." ~ George Santayana, The
Life of Reason, 1906
.
"When Western countries
in the past were as poor as Third World
countries are today, these Western countries
nevertheless had one big advantage: There was
no large and influential class of
the intelligentsia to impede their
progress with unsubstantiated theories and
counterproductive propaganda." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell
= these particular quotes came
from THIS
page on the "gap" between rich and
poor
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GOVERNMENT
SPENDING
DOES NOT
STIMULATE THE
ECONOMY.
IT HAMPERS
IT.
"We know that anything
government does private enterprise can
do for half the cost." -- Nobel
Prize-Winning Economist Dr. Milton
Friedman to Charlie Rose
12-26-2005
"Whenever the government runs things it
always costs twice as much as should be." --
Gerald Pearse
"Government purchases of military
hardware, highways, energy projects, space
equipment, and other items often cost 50% or
100%, or more (see here and here), above what
politicians originally promise." -- Chris Edwards
"When the government pays,
health care's lack of
affordability becomes a
self-fulfilling prophecy. In health
care, as in other things, government is the high-cost
producer." -- Arnold Kling
"The
idea of putting government in
charge of something to 'save money' is
INSANE." -- Ben Stein
"Every
time government attempts to handle our
affairs, it costs more and the results are
worse than if we had handled them
ourselves." -- Benjamin Constant
"Government does not do ANYthing
as well as the private sector does, and
that includes educating
your children." -- Neal Boortz
"Whenever the government
spends a million dollars on something
that could have been done in the private
sector, it ALWAYS sucks at least TWO
million dollars out of the real economy
to do it. THAT'S WHY the entire
Keynesian 'government spending
stimulates economic activity' theory
is failing big time and proving
disastrous again, right before our eyes
-- because it's pure, unadulterated
bullspit." -- Rick Gaber
“One of the methods used by statists to
destroy capitalism consists in
establishing controls that tie a given
industry hand and foot, making it unable
to solve its problems, then declaring that
freedom has failed and stronger controls
are necessary.” -- Ayn Rand
"Every time a politician says "a job was
created!!!" by government spending, you know
darn well at least TWO jobs (if not a lot
more) were NOT created in the private sector
as a result. Look up "THE BROKEN WINDOW
FALLACY." -- Bert Rand
.
More fallacies stupid
politicians rely on
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