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| Source:Hoover Institution- right-wing presidential historian Amity Shlaes on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson. |
"Amity Shlaes challenges the received wisdom that the Great Depression occurred because capitalism broke and that it ended because FDR, and government in general, came to the rescue. According to Shlaes, it was the government that made the Great Depression worse. And was FDRs progressivism, as evident in the New Deal, really all that new, or was it a step along a progressive continuum that already had been established?"
From the Hoover Institution
Anyone whose familiar with this blog, knows I'm not a big fan of the New Deal and knows I don't think it was a perfect economic agenda. It obviously didn't get us out of the Great Depression. Unemployment was still around 20% by the time we entered World War II in 1941-42. But to argue that the Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal made the Great Depression even worst, my question would be: compared with what?
To understand the Great Depression, you have to know about the New Deal, but also what the alternatives to the New Deal. The real Socialists (not the FDR Progressives) were talking about nationalizing private industries to prevent a future Great Depression.
The Conservatives of the time were talking about doing nothing. They were literally talking about doing nothing in response to the Great Depression and let the so-called free market (as if there's such a thing as a free market) would automatically fix the problems of the New Deal. They were literally arguing a negative, since we have no evidence and history of doing nothing to respond to economic crisis's, actually works. If you look at the New Deal objectively, (which might might be hard to do) it was actually the middle approach to what the Conservatives wanted to do and what the Socialists and Communists wanted to do to deal with the Great Depression.
Again, the New Deal was obviously not perfect, but to argue that it made the Great Depression worst, I mean we were back to economic growth by 1934-35 and people did go back to work. Millions of Americans were getting economic assistance to help them get through the Great Depression, like Unemployment Insurance. "The New Deal made the Great Depression worst" sounds like good right-wing talking points, but that's about it.
