Reddit reviews The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal (The Politically Incorrect Guides)

Civil Rights in the 60's were bad for black people m'kay?

Feminism: A one stop train to becoming a prostitute and hating families!

Because people killing each other in the Middle East is a GOOD thing.

Only rich white people can write good things.

BRITISH EMPIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRE fapfapfapfapfap

The USFG caused the Great depression. More specifically FDR.

Oh right, and capitalism had NOTHING to do with the Depression. At all.

The South WASN'T actually racist. Nope, they had Jesus on their side too. Also, you gave up your vacations in Cuba, you Yankee bastards.

Conservatives are the only real Americans! Everyone else is a dirty communist spy!

If you question the Bible, you question liberty and tolerance and reason.

Roman history is EXACTLY the same as US history. Also, the Middle Ages were the Age of Reason.

The Founding Fathers were conservatives. And totally supported the South in the Civil War, even though they were dead.

Evolution never happened!

And, of course... The US should be a Christian theocracy with slaves.

The same author also has a similar book on The Great Depression and the New Deal, feel free to take a crack at it. The author is also a creationist (pardon me, he actually "challenges the Darwinian paradigm" by promoting "intelligent design") who supports some of the craziest conspiracy theories about the UN.

Bonus: This book in the "Customers also bought this" section. Here's an enlarged cover and the books contents.

So here it is folks: Woodrow Wilson lead a Socialist coup on the US, Obama is a communist, healthcare reform is literally the Great Leap Forward all over again, it's just a matter of time before the US has Stalinist gulags around, "Socialism" has destroyed Sweden and Karl Marx has voted for Obama from beyond the grave!

I need a drink.

>According to this study

Did you actually read that study? Since that study was authored by Alan Blinder, one of the big proponents of the economically genius "cash for clunkers" stimulus program, I think it's reasonable to ask you go to the source and read what he is actually attempting to say and what it's based on.

Do you have the economic or statistical training to critique the "study"? Do you understand what they're claiming would have happened and what they base it on? Do you understand the assumptions they're making? Do you understand how and why the separated monetary policies (TARP, QE, etc.) from the fiscal stimulus packages? Do you understand the model they're using?

As a side note, I have a degree in economics. Econometrics is at its best when analyzing history (and even then, it has many flaws) and at its worst when attempting predictive models. For predictions, econometric modeling is a very, very inexact "science" and notoriously unreliable and subject to author bias. It's full of "just-so" sort of analysis and decisions which "just-so" happen to support what the authors wanted to believe (Alan Blinder has never seen a stimulus program he disagreed with and was, in fact, one of the big proponents for the government stimulus and programs). He is evaluating programs for which he, himself, advocated.

For example, the Moody's model, the one they're using to predict a counterfactual history is one of the premier models in the industry and it wholly failed to predict the Great Recession itself. If you look at the model, it wasn't even revised in a major way from the model which wholly failed to predict the Great Recession to the one they're currently using to predict a counterfactual and then using that data, fraught with flaws and issues, to make grandiose claims.

Furthermore, the Moody's model is based almost entirely on changes in spending. Additionally, one of its biggest flaws is that it has no real way to distinguish between good spending and bad spending. It's a Keynesian's wet dream sort of model, where they will get good predictions by literally burying money and paying people to dig it up and re-bury it. If the model were used, it would predict better economic outcomes if the US government, ever year, spent billions and billions burying things and paying people to dig them up and then redoing it. So, that should tell you a bit about how these models work.

There are many more problems with it, those are some. It is not good evidence to support what you're claiming.

>What evidence do you have to show that it did not help prevent a major recession?

There was a major recession with government intervention. Did you mean a worse recession? The Great Recession began in Late 2007 and the financial crises was in late 2008. What you wrote was "the entire world might be in a recession today" except you didn't actually support that. Now you have retreated to "it would be worse." There have been many periods in history where stocks plummeting similarly to 2007 and 2008 and yet it is always government policy and their actions which turn those plummets into "Great" anythings... or have you heard of the Great Depression of 1920 that never was?

Well, let's look at the almost Great Depression 2.0:

When you look at the numbers, the market performed better prior to TARP than afterwards (again, the Recession started in Dec 2007 and plunged through the summer) with ~22% drop in the market and bank stocks before and ~38% afterwards and 72% in bank stocks. In order to claim that TARP made it better, you would need to claim absent TARP, bank stocks would have dropped 90%+ which is, frankly, totally absurd. TARP is banks being compelled to take money with politicized strings attached... the market didn't and doesn't respond bullish to the government nationalizing and controlling private banks. This was shown for TARP and for the ESFR. Bank stocks #s adjusted were trading at fraction their 2008 value a few years after TARP.

The allegedly horrendously dire situation where the "market" was failing and every bank would collapse is a complete and total myth. Before the government interventions, the market was working. Bad assets were losing value and being purchased by other banks better situated. Government bailout of Bear Stearns signaled to the other banks that bailouts would be coming so the banks didn't raise capital when the could have. Lehman, instead of going to the market to sell at a reasonable valuation, waited for a bailout which never came and by then it was too late. The banking industry had ~$1.4T in assets with only $200B in delinquent assets at its worst. The four biggest American banks still made annualized profit in 2008 and these banks which were in such a dire position managed to pay back the TARP funds within a year... and that's during a period where unemployment continued to rise and the housing sector continued to deteriorate. All of this evidence runs counter to the narrative of the banks, as a sector, barely surviving and on the verge of collapse. They were not.

This giant bogeyman is just that, a bogeyman which lured politicians into selling everyone out for the express benefit of some of the richest people on Earth, including a huge percentage of filthy rich foreigners, wasn't real. The banks were not as an entire sector going to collapse. This isn't to say there weren't problems or that a recession wasn't going to happen. As I said, it was already happening long before government bailouts. Some of these banks would have failed. They would be broken up, restructured and sold back to the private sector.

The state was a major cause of the financial crisis (see: Bear Stearns bailout, Fannie and Freddie, WaMu) and the state's interventions lead to worse outcomes in the economy. The bailouts of the banks and other monetary policies were enormously expensive to the average American and will be expensive for many, many years to come. Claiming that absent government intervention it would have been the Great Depression 2.0 (a catastrophe also worsened if not outright caused by government intervention) which we may still be in simply doesn't fit the evidence we have. There is more evidence the bailouts caused a larger crisis than averted it.

But anyway, that's enough of this. This is one of the big problems with internet forums and comments like yours. You make a claim, scramble to google to find evidence for it, post it without reading the "study" let alone the article you actually linked, and then it takes others 10x the amount of time you spent shitposting essentially a google-search to deconstruct and explain how you're wrong and being misleading.

I have little doubt you will even read this comment or try to understand it in good faith, but hopefully others find value in it. Good luck.

The country had always seen business cycles - boom then panic. The difference with the Great Depression is that it was much deeper and lasted much longer. This was a direct result of FDR's efforts to "help." Ironically, FDR had run against Hoover as intervening too much in the economy, but that's the left for you.

See this and read this.

>it's pretty well accepted by experts

Your argument from authority is pretty lame. The great depression lasted so long becuase the government intervened to such a great extent. A big reason why it was able to intervene so much was because the gold standard was abandoned, gold confiscated, and made illegal.

Why doesn't government intervention help? The Broken Window Fallacy mainly. A lot of people falsely believe that the government has a lot of money that it can just hand out, but all the money the government has it gets from theft (tax), counterfeiting (money printing aka theft through inflation), or borrowing (postponing the first two). The unseen is what would have happened if this theft/counterfiting never would have happened? In short, individuals would have used their money in more productive ways than the government which is either inefficient or outright wasteful.

Where do you get your opinion from? What you learned in the government schools? Off course they're going to teach you the government saved everyone from the depression, why the hell did it last so long then when there were so many other market crashes, that were just as dramatic, that recovered so much quicker?

Some books:

http://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Guide-Depression-Guides/dp/1596980966

http://mises.org/rothbard/agd.pdf

*grammar fixed nazis

How do you think the war was paid off? The Federal Reserve, of course.

The US got out of the Depression largely through a return to free market principles and industry innovations after the end of the war. A lot of new technology was borne out of the wartime experience as a necessity to gain an edge over enemies, and this technology such as computing and radar were utilized to jump start new industries. Given that the United States was the only major power that emerged out of World War II relatively unscathed in infrastructure, population, and resources, it wasn't hard for the US to become the premier supplier of manufactured goods for the rest of the war-torn world.

I don't know where this sentiment that the New Deal somehow "saved America"; its policies were largely economically destructive, such as the destruction of perfectly good crops as mandated by the US Department of Agriculture as a means to reduce supply to "raise prices" for "destitute farmers", or the fact that government agents would patrol around cities looking to raid factories and businesses that would dare to produce goods after a certain, arbitrary time as mandated by the US Department of Labor for daring to employ workers to produce goods and services out of tune with the government policy of restraining production as a means to raise prices.

It seems, my friend, that you are in need of a good refresher of the actual history of the Great Depression. I recommend this book if you really wish to learn about the true nature of the "Do Nothing" Hoover and the "heroic" Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the actual effects of the "New Deal"'s destructive nature.

The short answer is no. The New Deal substantially prolonged the Great Depression, leading to a decade of high unemployment and poor living conditions, while gutting economic liberties within the US.

The long answer is Bob Murphy's outstanding book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal.

Yeah, here you go:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1596980966/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_rJ.bzbGB98S2C

https://www.amazon.com/dp/140005477X/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_0J.bzbKGKXDZE






https://www.amazon.com/dp/1416592377/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_II.bzbTVVKZTN

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0006D7CFM/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_tL.bzbW8JQ94A

> Securities regulation was enacted due to a failure in the market: the great depression.

Significant disagreement with that one. See here and here just for a start.

Also, let me also add I don't think the liberal caricature. I have come to believe that most of them seem to think that there is some combination of regulations, taxes, subsidies, entitlements, etc, that will make everything just balance out perfectly. I disagree obviously, but I don't think it's the blatant hypocrisy implied.

Remember now, it wasn't just the Depression: FDR made it Great.

Your using fucking HuffPo and TalkingPointsMemo as sources. Wow.

The chart in HuffPo is a projection from a single firm. A projection for 2019 no less. Not only that, it doesn't negate at all what I said because despite the Bush tax cuts contribution to the debt, it in no way argues that taking them away will make the rich exist inside a vacuum where behavior isn't effected by taxes nor does it argue that taking them away will still even do anything. About $90 billion in extra revenue is the best you can hope to expect. Not that much nowadays.

>In what period of time? The debt isn't really that big of a deal, we just need to worry about debt since we're borrowing nearly interest free money.

Greece said their debt wasn't a big deal either. Big cuts are needed, or the debt will continue to grow and default will eventually be the only option.

>Some of it yes, but you need to spend during times like these. That's how we got out of the first depression.

http://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Guide-Depression-Guides/dp/1596980966

Spending did little more than lead to a decade of double digit unemployment.


>Yep, he was wrong and it's hard to do anything with record-level obstructionism.

Blaming the other party for obstructionism is classic partisanship and nowadays just comes off as being upset because you don't have a one party dictatorship. Obama had two years of a supermajority in congress and the Democrats had 6 years of a congressional majority. Like I said, naivety at best.

>Funny, nothing you just said was true. Watch

"The white house put up a video that says everything is fine, so therefore everything is fine!" You're going to have to try harder.

>Sorry, try again

This is no way contradicts what I said. More were added under Bush. So? The number is still rising under Obama who has only been in office 4 years, and is still at its highest despite his promises to turn the economy around. Really intellectually dishonest.

>It's not a plug and I already said I'm not in favor of wars

"Vote for the Democrats if you want less of this stuff to happen"
"It's not a plug."

I don't have anything to add.

>You probably shouldn't argue with emotions, it makes you say irrational things like claim that there's a net loss of 500,000 jobs when in the REAL WORLD, it's actually a gain of 300,000.

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/the_rumble/2012/09/what-clinton-got-wrong

Very well, I should have said "manufacturing" but I can still argue that temporary service sector jobs that will be lost after the effects of stimulus wear off is hardly much to be proud of.

Deep recessions are followed by strong recoveries, and 300,000 stimulus jobs is not a strong recovery at all.

>Everybody knew it was going to take longer than 4 years to fix this problem.

Everybody except the Democrats who campaigned and made promises to fix everything in 2008 apparently. Obama even said that if he didn't have the economy normal by a certain time(there's a video on Youtube, but i can't find it), that he would be a one term president. He later admitted that it was "worse than he exepected." What economy did he think he was inheriting? Bhutan?

>His plate was pretty full

Pretty full going on vacations? But seriously, "he was doing other things" is not a valid excuse for corruption.

>Wrong again.

TPM is not a valid source.

>Nearly every thing you said to me was fallacious and/or completely incongruent with evidence. If anybody is taking the easy way out and just listening to talking points, it's you my friend.

I'm sure there is a mirror nearby where you can repeat that line. *edit grammar

I've heard this is easy to read and pretty good:

http://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Guide-Depression-Guides/dp/1596980966

If you want original, contemporary information I mentioned Mises Institute, but here are two professors who are Austrian school guys that are fairly young and very active:
Robert Murphy at Texas Tech: https://www.depts.ttu.edu/freemarketinstitute/people/murphy.php

Dan Smith, Middle Tennessee State University: https://www.mtsu.edu/faculty/daniel-j-smith

If you reach out to either and tell them what you are doing, I have no doubt they can refer you to lots of modern sources and peers whose research and publications you may love, that way you arent just referencing dead guys. These guys publish papers and write books right now from the Austrian perspective.

Roberty Murphy does a Podcast with Tom Woods (author of Meltdown) called "Contra Krugman" https://contrakrugman.com/

Murphy has written books like the Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression that spells out all the government intervention that brought that crash on. Its not purely about Austrian economics, but I recommend it to anyone just starting to explore central planning vs free markets: https://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Guide-Depression-Guides/dp/1596980966

Tom Woods is a good author with a couple of books. You'll also find a bunch of good info at his website.

I think my best recommendation though would be the Politically Incorrect Guide Capitalism and the
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal