Regime uncertainty and the Depression

Robert Higgs is a historian I've followed for a long time. Here is a brief discussion of his theory of "regime uncertainty" and the Great Depression. You will see that this is the same problem we have now.

The Return of the Great Depression

... is a timely book by Vox Day.

The Great Recession: worse than it looks

Today, over 14 million people are unemployed. We now have more idle men and women than at any time since the Great Depression.

Here we go, go, go...

We are on the edge of a great, great depression, and the Federal Reserve knows it. 
See also here. 

The Depression in color

Released: Rare color photographs of the Great Depression. 

This is a group of the familiar Farm Security Administration photographs, nothing more.

The color is nice, but remember that in evaluating photographic evidence, they are always subject to selection as is any other kind of evidence. In other words, you can use photos to show whatever you want to show. It just depends on which ones are selected.

Burton Folsom Jr. and Anita Folsom: Did FDR's New Deal end the Depression? No, they say, and they are absolutely correct. The New Deal's recovery programs like the WPA were a total failure. World War II stimulated employment but it was temporary. New Dealers worried as the war wound down that the Depression would come back with a vengeance when the servicemen and women returned home looking for jobs.

That old 1937 feeling

Paul Krugman warns about getting that 1937 feeling. Roosevelt cut back on the New Deal because he thought the Depression was over, and the result was a recession in the midst of the Depression. So Krugman's saying we can't cut back on government spending now.

But nothing that the New Deal with all of its alphabetic agencies had done down to 1937 ended the Depression, or afterward either. When will people learn that World War II ended the Depression. Unemployment was still 15 percent in 1940? The 1930s have plenty of lessons to teach, but this is not one of them.

Brad DeLong, an economist, says that the chance of another Great Depression is now about 5 percent. Before now he said the chance was zero. Well, that's not conforting.

Arthur Laffer discusses taxes, the Great Depression, and our current troubles.

"The damage caused by high taxation during the Great Depression is the real lesson we should learn. A government simply cannot tax a country into prosperity."

The Corner website has this post on "new" information on the Great Depression. It's not new information at all.

Economist James Buchanan, a Nobel laureate, argues that Obama is making the same mistakes and following the same destructive path that Roosevelt followed in the Great Depression. I've been waiting on someone to pick up on this parallel. We never seem to learn from history, we only repeat it.

Lee E. Ohanian, a UCLA economist, blames President Herbert Hoover for the Depression but with a surprising twist that I've never heard: his pro-labor policy that kept wages too high and encouraged job sharing, which in turn depressed employment. Ohanian says that this was the single most important event that caused the Depression. See this link. Well, let's take this further: Roosevelt's Section 7a of the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), Wagner Act (1935), Fair Labor Standards Act (1938). That's off the top of my head.

The usual culprits are the Smoot-Hawley tariff and raising taxes.