-- "B." <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote: "That's my understanding.
But there's a cottage industry on the right, and in the right-Libertarian economics world where conservatives get their economic ideas from, that under Hoover there was a "recession" which hovered around for 4 years or so 'til FDR took office in March, 1933 -- then FDR exacerbated the "recession" into full-blown Depression. FDR's attempts to solve the problem aggravated it. He should have sat on his hands reading the Greek classics in the Oval Office instead of doing "bold experimentation" or regulating anything."
As our resident economist, Doug Henwood, is well aware, back in the 1930s and early 1940s, John Maynard Keyens and Friedrich Hayek had squared off over that issue. By the late 1940s, Keynes was generally perceived within the economics profession and by policymakers to have won those debates. At the point, Hayek pretty much retired from economics research for the next thirty years, until he won the Nobel Prize in economics. At that point, he returned to active research in economics again, since by then, the ruling circles in the UK and US were once again interested in free-market economics' policies.
"Right-Libs like Amity Shlaes provide the econo-ammunition, and Hannity, et. al, regurgitate it more broadly but parlayed into their own social conservative framework. The revisionist history on FDR has been at fever pitch lately."
All this segues back to my other two points: The fear that Keynesian activism will empower labor at the expense of capital. When FDR embarked on such policies in his first term, the US was on the brink of major civil unrest. Both Socialist and Communists were actively organizing unemployed councils in major US cities. That's why big capital was, albeit reluctantly, tolerant of FDR's policies, since there was justified fear of a social explosion. At the present time, such fears don't seem as justified. We certainly don't have a reasonably well organized radical left to press the point. Hence, the willingness of people like Hannity to have Obama sit on his hands while the economy sinks.
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