This webinar will consider why the current recovery is proceeding so slowly, if at all. It will approach this question by comparing the current situation with the incomplete recovery from the Great Depression that occurred between 1933 and 1939. Before 1929, in U.S. history, absent extensive government intervention in the market system, business-cycle recoveries normally occurred within a year or two. Slow recovery, ironically, has been associated with extensive government efforts to bring about or speed recovery. The webinar will consider various ways in which the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations and the Bush and Obama administrations impeded a rapid, complete recovery from a business bust. Special attention will be given to how “do something” governments can create “regime uncertainty”―pervasive, serious apprehension about the security of private property rights―which causes private investors and business people to refrain from the long-term investment and the hiring of full-time, permanent employees that are necessary for normal recovery and sustained economic growth.
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This is a great chance to meet and greet this giant of liberty – made possible through digital media and the Mises Academy. Imagine if you had been around in the 1930s and had the chance to directly study under Mises for one hour. This is a similar opportunity. The cost is only $25.
I just read “Traitor to His Class, The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt” by H.W. Brands, and any sane person can see that NO ONE had a cure for the last Depression — Hoover had the depression from Oct. 1929 to March 1933 (inauguration back then was in March), and he applied supply-side trickle-down, make-the-rich-happy economics to no avail. Hoover’s failure accounted for Roosevelt’s popularity. Roosevelt DID get the banking industry into recovery, partly by allowing weak banks to fail. The CCC etc. was palliative, giving work to young people and others, but Roosevelt was decidedly NOT in favor of deficit-spending at that time, and was against long-term “relief” and unemployment payments — he wanted jobs, not hand-outs. Today’s political arena has precisely the same actors: Let the economic cycle run it’s course (with whatever human suffering is needed), let Private Industry fix it, spend a lot on public works, try to regulate prices and wages (no-no with the Supreme Court back then). No One had a solution — until 1937-1940 when War provided the reason for increasing production. In the 1930s the U.S. was the #1 Creditor nation (everyone owed us money) and had a huge surplus of domestic oil, none was imported. How different in this Second Depression!
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