mercytruth #38
freemasonry had as much to do with where we are today in America than anything else.
Wild hunches and speculations get us nowhere, concerning a financial collapse of the U.S. economy, but facts can and should.
The economies of the West, led by the U.S.A., are widely considered to be “market” economies, but they are not the free enterprise economies arising from the the Catholic Late Scholastics (“the ‘founders’ of scientific economics”) and the Austrian school of economics, because these Western markets are deluged and deluded by interventionism.
The start was in 1929, and when FDR took office in March 1933 consolidated it by even worse policies – he institutionalized the Great Depression.
If Coolidge made 1929 inevitable, it was President Hoover who prolonged and deepened the depression, transforming it from a typically sharp but swiftly-disappearing depression into a lingering and near-fatal malady, a malady “cured” only by the holocaust of World War II. Hoover, not Franklin Roosevelt, was the founder of the policy of the “New Deal”: essentially the massive use of the State to do exactly what Misesian theory would most warn against — to prop up wage rates above their free-market levels, prop up prices, inflate credit, and lend money to shaky business positions. Roosevelt only advanced, to a greater degree, what Hoover had pioneered. The result for the first time in American history, was a nearly perpetual depression and nearly permanent mass unemployment. The Coolidge crisis had become the unprecedentedly prolonged Hoover-Roosevelt depression
Further, At Hoover’s insistence, followed by FDR, wages remained high even throughout the Great Depression propping up unemployment at an average of 18% throughout. The Keynesian “purchasing power” fallacy of prosperity had trumped over the fact that savings are the source of investment. Yet Americans bought more than twice as many refrigerators in 1935 with unemployment over 20% than they bought in 1929 with unemployment at 3.2%, but over a million had no wages at all. By 1938, 1.2 million were out of work. The continued failure was to realise that wages are a cost of doing business and that for maximum employment have to reach a sustainable level.
The Great Depression was fuelled by Hoover and then F.D.R. using his socialist New Deal by raising taxes, expanding public works spending, establishing welfare programs, destroying existing crops, imposing acreage reduction requirements, legislating for cartels to establish minimum selling prices, and limit output. We all know how deep and long that fiasco was.
Without those policies econometric estimates show that the “Depression would have been completely over (less than 5% unemployment) by 1936.” [Richard K Vedder & Lowell E Gallaway, *Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America (New York, Holmes & Meier, 1993, p 142].
More recently, as Federal Reserve chairman between 1987 and 2006, Greenspan acted even more irresponsibly than the Fed officials he was criticizing. Rather than, “sopping up the excess reserves,” Greenspan added even more, transforming a stock market bubble into a housing and consumer spending bubble of historic and unprecedented proportions.[3]
[3] Peter Schiff, *Crash Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse *(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007), pp. xiii-xiv.
