Good Lord. Talk about projection.

It’s funny, y’all. Keep it up.

Also, Freedomfan is very good too.

“Conservatives” made the same types of comment about clinton in ’92 and yet we had 8 years of prosperity and he was 100% effective at keeping iraq from developing WMD’s.

History is on the side of the party of “liars and traitors”. When will you learn that?

But the nation may not survive the next 4 years. I’d rather not take that risk. The Obama presidency is going to be a disaster economically and he will not stop Iran from getting the bomb.

Its the party of liars and traitor vs the party of stupid. Unfortunately, stupid is the better choice in this election.

In fact when you look back to the boom and bust cycles of the 19th century liquidity crises triggering economic busts is a recurring theme. This is why we ended up with the fed – it was clear that a government body tasked with stabilizing the money supply was necessary for the economy to really move forward. With the exception of the great depression (when it is clear the fed didn’t do its job) it has largely worked.

I hadn’t thought about the ’20s expansion of the money supply, does it parallel the low fed interest rates we have seen over the last several years?

From my experience, unjustified complexity is frequently used as a smokescreen to hide stuff that would otherwise be recognized as clearly wrong. I am reminded of a booklet that offered a way to compute the circumference of a circle relative to its diameter without using pi. The formula it game had all sorts of squares and square roots and other such stuff. The value it computed for circumference, however, was always precisely equal to 3.1416 times the diameter, at least if one didn’t lose precision on any of the intermediate steps. No “pi” required!

Also, which is more useful as a means of understanding physics: F=mA + a fudge factor which is really tiny at speeds far below that of light, or a more precise formula which includes all known relativistic effects? Many things are really nowhere near as complicated as some people would claim. In some ways, the situation resembles that of the Heliocentrist-vs-Geocentrist debate. The Geocentrists had pretty good models for where and when stars would be observed in the sky, but they were complicated. The Heliocentrists had much simpler models, but they turned out in many ways to be more useful.

Talk about making someone’s point for them :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02veWtxaaS4&eurl=http://thinkprogress.org/

Actually, I have never heard a libertarian seriously declaim S-H “as the sole cause of the depression”. Most libertarians note that the resulting massive reduction in trade had the most direct impact on the agricultural sector and led many farmers, who had leveraged their property for operating capital, into foreclosure. That, in turn, exacerbated the run on banks, and so on down the line.

Although libertarians are hardly monolithic on causes of the Depression, other more widely-known libertarian criticisms of government action during the period include some combination of the Federal Reserve 1) expanding the money supply during the twenties, which led to easy money lending and a destabilizing bubble. And 2), the fed held to tight money policy during a period of critically low liquidity after the stock crash and S-H and turned a normal cyclical downturn into a long-lasting calamity.

Personally, I find it unlikely that a single cause can explain the whole financial crisis. But, I think it’s tough to look at the actions of government during the period and not conclude that it took a bad situation and made it worse.

Thanks again from the bottom of my pants.

:D

Sure it can, like it solved it in 1929, by contracting the economy by 20% and leaving millions unemployed and starving. Sometimes the free market solutions are not the best ones.

So, you’re saying that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff had absolutely no part in the depression…and that it was all the free market?

Intellectuals and/or politicians are real good at coming up with theories, plans, and such…it’s the free market that gives us the evidence of what works and what doesn’t.

Sure it can, like it solved it in 1929, by contracting the economy by 20% and leaving millions unemployed and starving. Sometimes the free market solutions are not the best ones.

“Starting with Wilson, the intellectuals have lead this nation down the path of socialism and big government.”

And prosperity unprecedented in the history of the world.