<p>I love how LogicWarrior is strangely absent to reply after you informed him of the actual historical progression of The Great Depression.</p>
<p>This is how an argument with LogicWarrior usually goes:</p>
<p>LW: Yo, you’re wrong
Opposition(op): No I’m not <em>explains thoughts via text</em>
LW: <em>posts link</em>
OP: Refutes link with cohesive thoughts
LW: <em>posts yet another link</em>
OP: Dude, enough with the links already…
LW: <em>never returns</em></p>
<p>While I do disagree with the OP’s main point (that the unemployed despair too much), I do think that he has handled the countless attacks against him well. He is 100% correct when he says that having a degree does little to make one’s opinion more correct. Greenspan has a PhD in economics from NYU, but his policies as Fed chairman failed miserably. Quite the same with Bernanke. He had a 1590/1600 as well as a Phd from MIT, but his time as Fed Chairmen has been dreadful.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Greenspan’s policies were fundamentally correct. That’s why the Clinton years saw so much economic growth. Why did the Federal Reserve loosen the money supply? To support George Bush’s tax cuts and the Middle Eastern wars. If not, then the government would’ve bankrupted. He had no choice. </p></li>
<li><p>The OP thinks there’s always an oversupply of jobs. He doesn’t understand the difference between “want” and economic demand. Demand is the goods purchased at a certain price. Therefore, maybe 6 billion people want iPods, but the demand of iPods isn’t 6 billion. Because maybe only several hundred million are willing to purchase them at $300 each! Hence, to “cure” the oversupply of jobs just increase prices.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>This is a problematic definition, because then you would have market equilibrium even with a price floor…if you can’t purchase because you are legally barred from purchasing, then you aren’t part of the demand, right? </p>
<p>Wrong.</p>
<p>Labour demand includes transactions that didn’t take place because supply failed to meet the appropriate hirers. </p>
<p>It is simply a problem of organisation.</p>
<p>Globally, in a closed system, labour demand > labour supply. Once you fulfill all labour demand in every sector of the economy, you always get new labour demand somewhere else. The decrease in opportunity cost allows hiring to occur in some sector again, and so on and so forth.</p>
<p>(Part of the issue is that whole point-in-time thing, since you know, hiring and production are time-dependent processes. Theoretically, you could have that one split-second moment where demand = supply. But that isn’t reality.)</p>
<p>"This is how an argument with LogicWarrior usually goes:</p>
<p>LW: Yo, you’re wrong
Opposition(op): No I’m not <em>explains thoughts via text</em>
LW: <em>posts link</em>
OP: Refutes link with cohesive thoughts
LW: <em>posts yet another link</em>
OP: Dude, enough with the links already…
LW: <em>never returns</em>"</p>
<p>heh, actually citing people in a discussion is so dumb</p>
<p>Also, please stop being so ****ing intellectually dishonest. It’s sickening.</p>
<p>Please note, Andrew Mellon became “unpopular” in the Great Depression (wiki mirror articles are like half of the first front page results) because he argued that market correction be allowed to continue; let businesses be allowed to form on the ashes of the old, inefficient businesses. </p>
<p>That sounded heartless to most people (namely because of their economic shortsightedness, unable to take a little hardship for future prosperity), and so made him unpopular. He didn’t actually get to carry out any of his desired policies with the onset of the market panic – his policies were all reversed. </p>
<p>Hardly the case that Andrew Mellon “caused it”. On the contrary, while the New Deal did some good, FDR also helped entrench the Great Depression for many years into his presidency by espousing protectionism that prevented the formation of new private enterprise.</p>
<p>Perhaps you should actually argue a case, any case, any of the cases you read off the internet, in this thread. You know, instead of being intellectually dishonourable and effectively plagiarising in a debate. Maybe actually show that you understand something, not some 10-year-old kid who uses links to copy and paste term papers to submit for homework.</p>
<p>I doubt there are 2,000 libertarian economists. the ones that are seem to disagree with you:</p>
<p>“Milton Friedman likes–alas! liked–to quote R.G. Hawtrey of the British Treasury, who said that Mellon and the others who thought in 1930-1933 that the big danger was excessive inflation were “crying ‘Fire! Fire!’ in Noah’s Flood.” A nationwide banking panic is altogether a bad thing. In this dismissal of Mellon’s economic policy Friedman was in complete agreement with John Maynard Keynes:”</p>
<p>Except you ignore the fact that Friedman wasn’t in agreement with FDR’s policy or the next Secretary of the Treasury either. </p>
<p>Andrew Mellon’s concern about inflation had nothing to do with the fact that hiking up the business tax rates and the tax rates – since across-the-board low taxes is a key tenet of Mellonism – for everyone was absolutely the wrong decision to make. (But one that FDR made.) Milton Friedman would also have agreed with Andrew Mellon’s argument that market corrective forces be allowed to take hold. </p>
<p>And FDR’s policy wasn’t really Keynesian. The idea was to reduce spending once the recession passed, that is, the deficit could be eliminated once public pump-priming was no longer needed. This never occurred.</p>
<p>It’s revisionist history to say that Mellon’s policies benefited America and that FDR’s hurt it. FDR’s government spending raised GDP, lowered unemployment, and slowly but surely brought us out of the worst economic crises we’ve ever had. The safety nets he put in place, like social security, have kept any recession we’ve had, including the current one, from becoming a depression. When FDR really cranked up government spending due to World War II, the economy experienced a 20-year boom.</p>
<p>Mellon, on the other hand, deregulated business and lowered taxes. That should sound familiar, it was the exact same policy of the Bush administration. The Bush presidency of 01-08 followed nearly the same economic policies as the Harding/Coolidge presidencies of 21-28. Both resulted in economic crises at the end of the decade.</p>
<p>Happy now? If this was all a ■■■■■ to get me to make an effort post instead of posting links to people who prove you wrong, then you got me.</p>
<p>Actually the boom occurred when tax rates started returning to normal… yes WWII allowed the economy to return to normal … but that’s like the boom that should have happened.</p>
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<p>Except you forget, Bush was also in the hands of the Religious Right, disrupted scientific innovation and was in league with the creationists, had no structure to his tax cuts (they were in the wrong places), started a war…</p>
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<p>Really? Social security currently occupies 25% of the US budget, yet isn’t really a great help to most of its recipients.</p>
<p>I don’t disagree with safety nets, and I agree with <em>some</em> of the programmes of the New Deal … and clearly you are avoiding the protectionist buy-American policies of FDR here which helped suppress exports and economic growth for many years. So much money went into promoting the growth of government control without any of it being fed back into the growth of enterprise.</p>
<p>From 1933 to 1945 that unemployment graph inversely represents government spending. Spending went down in 1937, resulting in the only unemployment increase of his entire presidency.</p>
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<p>Not true. The booming economy in the 50’s occured simultaneously with a 90% top tax rate.</p>
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<p>His tax cuts were for the rich, much like Mellon’s. And wars are good for the economy, so it would be more correct to say that his policies failed despite starting two wars. The religious argument doesn’t apply, since creationism was taught in almost every school in the 1920’s. Remember the Scopes Monkey Trial?</p>
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<p>Tell that to a retired person living on it.</p>
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<p>I’m against protectionism, and think that the economy would have recovered faster if it weren’t for his protectionist policies. But you can’t deny the economy recovered.</p>
<p>“Greenspan’s policies were fundamentally correct. That’s why the Clinton years saw so much economic growth.”</p>
<p>Is this a joke? Growth in the Clinton and Bush years was completely phony. Consumption made up the majority of it, and that was because credit was so freely available. The minority of the growth was actual production. The policies may have seemed correct during the boom, but it is pretty obvious that they failed now, during the bust. </p>
<p>“Why did the Federal Reserve loosen the money supply?”</p>
<p>This had very little to do with the war or tax cuts. The large creation of money supply, while I have no idea why it was done, in part caused the housing bubble, as well as the mass consumption via credit. Now, after all those loans that were distibuted in the past era’s cannot paid back, the finance industry is collapsing.</p>
<p>^ That shows just how clueless Greenspan was. He was “trying to manage something he could not define”</p>
<p>Saying that someone is deaf on a message board is like saying that you can hear colours.</p>
<p>Also, what’s wrong with Socialism? Just because your political ideology disagrees does not mean it is wrong. The closest we’ve ever come to Socialism was during FDR’s years—and it worked, coupled with WWII.</p>
<p>If the economy is “expanding” because suddenly resources are being utilized to build 80 million dollar tanks, GDP can be deceiving. That 80 million dollar tank does no one any good in peacetime. More importantly, an 80 million dollar tank cannot even build more 80 million dollar tanks, whereas televisions can educate, serve public messages, make the market more efficient…military equipment in general, is not a good that “gives back” to the economy.</p>
<p>No, the common individual does not have any say in the situation. No, for any hope of a solution to occur, he must trust the oligopoly of Great Ivy League Economic Advisors turning the Magic Knob. It must be through Government Action, a Planner with foresight.</p>
<p>Think about it. Why should it take several years for an economy to “recover” and for productivity to return? Is there a drought? A tropical storm? Potato blight? Waiting for liquidity to trickle in or magically appear? Waiting for a few more years of people’s deposits so banks can “rebuild”? I mean, it’s not like Wall Street destroyed all the concrete factories – the goods and services necessary for regrowth are still there, waiting to be used. </p>
<p>Whatever it is, apparently it is something only the Government can help solve or “stimulate” through top-down measures.</p>
![http://www2.nationalreview.com/dest/2009/01/08/fdr.jpg[/url]](http://www2.nationalreview.com/dest/2009/01/08/fdr.jpg%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
