Quotes

"Fascism and communism both promise "social welfare," "social justice," and "fairness" to justify authoritarian means and extensive arbitrary and discretionary governmental powers." - F. A. Hayek"

"Life is a Bungling process and in no way educational." in James M. Cain

Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill

"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero

As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”

"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"Law is where you buy it." Raymond Chandler

"Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?" Clarence Day

"If I feel like feeding squirrels to the nuts, this is the place for it." - Cluny Brown

"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what you have." Owen Wister "The Virginian"

Oscar Wilde said about the death scene in Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth.” ~ Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” ~ Jonathon Swift

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Hoover started FDR’s New Deal that put the US into a long deep depression. There was little "Great" about it.

There is nothing "Great" about this recession either. Bush, his cronies, and the Democrat Congress intervened in the economy. Then Obama deepened the current recession by restructuring it with Obamacare and continuous over-regulation! The path is familiar and has led to economic perdition.
Nothing but incompetent government intervention.

FDR’s Advisers Knew What Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman Don’t | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty
by Steven Horwitz posted August 18, 2011

One persistent myth that libertarians and other free-market types have to unmask is that President Herbert Hoover’s belief in laissez faire was responsible for dramatically worsening what became the Great Depression. The myth that Hoover stood around and did nothing while the economy collapsed gets repeated ad nauseum in the media by pundits including everyone from Nobel Prize winners like Paul Krugman to, most recently, MSNBC talk-show host Rachel Maddow.

The punditry is right about one thing: Hoover can be blamed for turning what would have likely been a severe but short market correction in the wake of the artificial boom of the 1920s into a deep and long Great Depression. The reason, however, is not that Hoover did nothing, but that he did many things. Hoover, much like FDR, was skeptical about free markets, as both his earlier work as secretary of commerce and his own description of his beliefs made clear. Faced with the worsening crisis in the fall of 1929, he expanded the federal government’s role in a whole variety of ways.

Long List of Interventions

Without going into detail about any one of them, the Hoover interventions include: expanded public works, greater government control over agriculture, the Smoot-Hawley tariff, a virtual end to immigration, government loans for construction and other businesses, and greater enforcement of antitrust laws. Most important was Hoover’s pressuring businesses to not cut wages even as the prices of their output fell. The result was higher real wages, which were responsible for the unemployment rate topping out at 25 percent, causing the greatest human toll of the Great Depression. (I ignore here the very important mistakes made by the Federal Reserve System in allowing the major deflation to take place, not because it was unimportant – it was crucial to making matters worse – but because Hoover had no real control over the Fed.)

Hoover also proposed budgets that raised total federal expenditures by almost 50 percent in nominal dollars and over 60 percent when we adjust for the deflation. He ran budget deficits in 1931 and 1932 that were 52.5 percent and 43.3 percent of total federal expenditures those two years. No year under Roosevelt between 1933 and 1941 had a deficit that large. Finally, in 1932 Hoover presided over the largest peacetime tax increase [1] in U.S. history, which among other things increased the income-tax rate on top incomes from 25 to 63 percent. This is hardly the program of a man committed to laissez faire.

[read on at the above link and read more in depth in Amity Shlaes' "Forgotten Man"]

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