Pfft, Bush had to play the disastrous hand that that immoral snake Clinton dealt him, and did a remarkable job with it. American business is booming! Just look at our low unemployment rate, which is even illustrated in this hateful mainstream media article.

Try again, libtards.

-Cathy, (white 42, 249 lbs, FUP) Omaha.

I agreed with this article's premise. The Bush administration has fucked up our economy. This is true.

However I lolled when he said the solution was Keynesian economics. LOL.

This dude blamed Hoover for causing the Great Depression ... which is entirely incorrect. The Depression got worse during the Hoover administration because of the actions taken by the Federal Reserve, which the president has no control over, and which is premised upon the Keynesian ideals that this dude swears by.

And then claiming that FDR's big-government is what saved us all is even more laughable. The New Deal was a joke. Until the US entered WWII, shit was getting worse, or at best, evening out but staying similarly crappy under the 'new deal.' What America needed was a sudden industrial output to cancel out the negative effects of the inflationary policies of the central banking system. Had Hitler decided not kill people, America never would have recovered from the depression under FDR's policies.

This guy does it better than me...

Anyway, I agree with his diagnosis, but disagree with the course of treatment.

if the new deal was bullshit and our economic recovery was due to war, then how do you explain the fact that in many ways our economy is tanking, and yet we're at war?

Europe paid handsomely for the effort. Imagine our economy had Hitler actually won, even worse if Japan and Hitler won and split the world into thirds.

Inflation's negative effects are minimized when the industrial output increases to match the rate of inflation. WWII was a sudden and massive increase in industrial output. We sent many more men off to war, and put the womenfolk to work at home. This output 'cancelled out' (although not really) the problems caused by inflation.

Right now, we are at war, but the industrial output for that war is not nearly as drastic, there are not nearly as many men at war, and we are continuing to inflate our currency at a faster rate than we are producing industrial increases.

War does not by itself improve an economy -- that is a fallacy. HOWEVER, WWII did improve the economy, because of it's scale, suddenness, and the massive build-up that was required for it.

Keep in mind that the military-industrial complex has kept our military spending relatively high (as compared to the period between WWI and WWII), so the industrial output required to go to war in Iraq isn't nearly as great as it was to get into Europe and the Pacific. We had to build thousands of planes and tanks. We built new ships for the navy, and re-fitted old ones. Contrasting that to Iraq, we bought some shit, but not THAT MUCH more. Thanks to the Cold War, we already had a lot of the stuff we needed.

i'm sure glad someone here can correct the misguided notions of a nobel laureate!

Adam Smith on planed-economies (aka dissing Keynes before he was even born):

'The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests or the strong prejudices which may oppose it: he seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board; he does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.'

A Nobel prize is not evidence of an economist's correctness, nor of their ability to do anything other than convince a committee of very much fallible individuals that they have contributed something worthy. This committee is entirely capable of being wrong.

uart: nullifying the decisions of the nobel prize committee

'if the new deal was bullshit and our economic recovery was due to war, then how do you explain the fact that in many ways our economy is tanking, and yet we're at war?'

Easy: big business backed the launch of this war and big business is profiting from this war.

Next question, please?

For what it's worth, a lot of economists (Paul Krugman excluded) believe that WWII only partially benefitted the economy due to the increased employment rate, and increased industrial production that came with such a large-scale war effort. The lasting effect of that war wasn't so great. Robert Higgs did a study of public opinion polls and US Financial markets during and for some time after the depression, and concluded that the major influence in the economic recovery after the war was that after the war, and the Roosevelt administration, resources became available for peacetime production, and confidence amongst consumers and investors returned to normal. Prior to and partially during the war, polls showed that investors were hesitant to invest in industry, as they had little confidence that the government under Roosevelt would not seize their investments.

This is not a question.

Prior to and partially during the war, polls showed that investors were hesitant to invest in industry, as they had little confidence that the government under Roosevelt would not seize their investments.

yeah and roosevelt kept ransacking the banks too