Hoover was against big business, big labor, or big government as a solution to the Depression. He had always promoted trade associations rather then the market. He even wrote a book denouncing laissez-faire.
On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 10:10:29AM -0500, Jon Johanning wrote:
> On Sunday, March 7, 2004, at 04:49 PM, michael wrote:
>
> > Hoover never favored laissez-faire.
>
> He was not a pure, doctrinaire laissez-fairist, but for some reason he
> seemed to be a lot more timid and restrained an advocate of government
> action than FDR. True to his engineering background, his approach was
> to commission a huge study of the whole state of the nation before
> getting the government to act, whereas FDR plunged right in.
>
> Of course, as Kennedy points out, the government was much smaller
> during the Hoover administration than it became under FDR, so it was
> not able to do as much. And the crisis became much more serious by the
> time FDR was inaugurated. Starting with the "100 days," FDR created a
> whole raft of agencies and programs that didn't exist before; I'm not
> quite sure why, but he seemed to be much more uninhibited in this
> direction than Hoover.
>
> Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org
> __________________________________
> A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You
> should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest
> and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax
>
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-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu