The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism by Robert P. Murphy

Author:Robert P. Murphy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: politics
ISBN: 9781596985049
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2007-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read

FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression by Jim Powell; New York: Crown Forum, 2003.

In light of the above examples, it is clear that Herbert Hoover was not the “friend of big business” and proponent of laissez-faire that most history books claim. What is the source of this myth? Is it that Hoover sold himself as a believer in property rights and economic liberty to the voters, and that future historians were hoodwinked by his campaign rhetoric? Perhaps, but the following description of Hoover’s response to the 1929 crash by Hoover himself during his bid for reelection suggests otherwise:

[W]e might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action.... No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such times.... For the first time in the history of depression, dividends, profits, and the cost of living, have been reduced before wages have suffered.... They were maintained until the cost of living had decreased and the profits had practically vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world.

Creating new jobs and giving to the whole system a new breath of life; nothing has ever been devised in our history which has done more for . . . “the common run of men and women.”. . . Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until we had found bottom. . . . We determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see the whole body of debtors of the United States brought to bankruptcy and the savings of our people brought to destruction.5

In another odd twist, Hoover’s opponent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, accused Hoover of “reckless and extravagant” spending, of thinking that “we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible,” and of leading the “greatest spending administration in peace-time in all of history.”6

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.