Great Depression

I do not believe that failure of the free market caused the Great Depression. President Hoover was the President when the Great Depression started and he was not a practitioner of a free market economy as the Smoot-Hawley act proves. The ‘high-wage’ policy of the Hoover administration and the trade unions succeeded only in pricing workers out of the labor market, generating an increasing circle of unemployment.” Hoover signed the Revenue Act of 1932. The largest tax increase in peacetime history, it doubled the income tax. Can any serious scholar observe the Hoover administration’s massive economic intervention and, with a straight face, pronounce the inevitably deleterious effects as the fault of free markets?

 I do not think government intervention is what helped us out of the economy.  Some economists have estimated that the NRA boosted the cost of doing business by an average of 40 percent. Roosevelt helped some get jobs but it was his wasteful spending and other meddling that kept people out of jobs and the Depression prolonged. The genesis of the Great Depression lay in the irresponsible monetary and fiscal policies of the U.S. government in the late 1920s and early 1930s.