| | От | Chestnut |  |
| К | Игорь Куртуков |  |
| Дата | 16.03.2005 21:07:41 |  |
| Рубрики | Прочее; WWII; Политек; |  |
Re: Вы подтвердили...
The massive unemployment of the Great Depression, rather than representing a failure of capitalism, resulted from too much government intervention. Herbert Hoover’s “jawboning” efforts to raise real wages generated unemployment 28 percent higher than it would have been if real wages had remained constant.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s subsequent New Deal prolonged rather than alleviated the Great Depression. Without the negative impact of new federal labor laws, social security, and unemployment compensation alone, the unemployment rate would have been 6.7 instead of 17.2 percent.
After World War II, the government released 12 million Americans into the job market while simultaneously slashing government spending. Yet in a dramatic refutation of Keynesian economic theory, the market absorbed the workers and unemployment never rose over four percent.
Between 1930 and 1939 U.S. unemployment averaged 18.2 percent. The economy's output of goods and services (gross national product) declined 30 percent between 1929 and 1933 and recovered to the 1929 level only in 1939... Between 1933 and 1937, the unemployment rate dropped from 25 to 14 percent before a new recession pushed it back up to 19 percent in 1938.
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Many economists now believe that the New Deal, apart from its gold policy, probably had little impact on economic activity. At the heart of the early New Deal were the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the Agriculture Adjustment Act (AAA). Created in Roosevelt's first hundred days, they sought to promote recovery by propping up prices. The idea was to improve incomes and halt bankruptcies. The AAA tried to eliminate agricultural surpluses (pigs were slaughtered, crops destroyed) and paid farmers not to plant. The NRA allowed companies in the same industry to set wages, prices, and working hours in an effort to check "destructive competition." This approach rested on a remarkable contradiction: the way to get recovery, which requires more production, is to have less production. There never has been much evidence that it worked, and the Supreme Court found the NRA unconstitutional in 1935.
The New Deal also caused suffering. Sharecroppers were often thrown out of work, for example, when the AAA paid landowners not to grow. The New Deal also fostered class consciousness. Roosevelt increasingly blamed the depression on the wealthy—"economic royalists," as he called them. The loss of business confidence in government policies may have deterred new investment, offsetting any economic stimulus of higher public spending. But by 1933 the economy had been so ravaged that only a partial recovery may have been possible until the huge wartime boom.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GreatDepression.html