The New Deal was not as widely popular as many stories about FDR might suggest. The Depression began about midway through 1929. Prices fell for four years. Unemployment was as high as it had ever been, and for a long time. Construction work disappeared.
State and local levels of government were more burdensome to people in the early stages of our country than federal levels. The national government mainly received revenue through tariffs and land sales.
Government was different in the 19th Century, but not as starkly different as some people believe. The 20th Century was the Progressive Era. Foreign policy went from staying out of European quarrels to policing the world whether the world desired policing or not. Unchecked government intervention became the rule.
The growth of government power in American history has been by creating emergencies that then necessitate a ratcheting up of centralized power and war. Crisis & Leviathan by Higgs is a prime resource for this topic.
The role of ideology in the growth of government is required as intellectual cover for what is done regardless of the government form (e.g. monarchy or socialism). For example, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. played such an intellectual role.
"There can be no such thing as a nation flourishing alone in commerce: she can only participate; and the destruction of it in any part must necessarily affect all." Thomas Paine.
Allan Meltzer did not set out to encourage Americans to consider the unthinkable: the Fed is so dangerous to our economic and political health that it should go. But maybe, just maybe, his new but flawed book may reignite a debate that goes back to Jacksonian America. Gregory Bresiger is the reviewer.
There are clues and warnings, beyond mere contrarian instincts, that inflation will once again have her day. Inflation is a process that forcefully re-distributes wealth from one group to another. Prices do not change uniformly in this process, and those that get the new dollars before their costs have risen gain at the expense of those whose costs rise first.
Can a few courageous writers like Tom DiLorenzo and his colleagues, using logic, evidence, and moral suasion, negate what their opponents thought they had won with over a million troops on battlefields 138 years ago?
A contributing problem of the 1990s economic boom was ideological, and it is one that still persists in the aftermath, writes Christopher Mayer. It was a cultural error that made a hero out of a Fed Chairman and that put so much faith in the Fed to begin with, at the expense of sound economics.
