Yin and Yang at the Torygraph

One often wonders what's going on at The Torygraph, with their dialectical swings between the Yin and Yang of Sense and Anti-Sense, but there's another example this morning.

We have the simply laughable Edmund Conway with some utter moonbeam nonsense about how Hoover and Roosevelt were non-interventionists:

=> G20 Summit: an easy guide to judge its success or failure

This contrasts rather sharply with the sunbeam sense of Iain Martin, in the next-door article:

=> Recovery will be powered by free markets - not hype at the G20

It's all very bizarre. I suppose the Torygraph editor would say that this reflects the 'Broad Church' of opinion within the mainstream 'right' of this country, but surely we have The Grauniad as a natural home for the Keynesians?

Oh well. Back to work...

(My retort to Mr Conway)

Jack Maturin on April 02, 2009 at 09:35 AM

Edmund, when will you and AEP ever stop with this nonsense that Hoover and Roosevelt were non-interventionists, in the 1930s?

The Federal Reserve caused the depression in the 1930s, aided and abetted by these two presidents and their policies of wasteful government controls and intervention.

Here is a quote from Hoover, on his renomination for the Republican ticket before the election which Roosevelt won:

"We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead, we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action."

And that was the supposedly non-interventionist Hoover! After Hoover, we of course had the "Stimulus King" himself, F.D.Roosevelt, who did all he possibly could to keep America in the depression, for as long as he was able.

It was only in 1946, when most of the Roosevelt controls were finally lifted, that economic recovery came to the United States, to finally get the US back to its 1929 position in 1954, twenty five years after the crash.

Please do get hold of "America's Great Depression" by Murray Rothbard. It really will help.

You can find it online at Scribd.com and at Mises.org.

For a taster, you might want to try chapter 12, here:

=> http://mises.org/rothbard/agd/chapter12.asp

The horror of the Hoover/Roosevelt myth is that we are repeating it all over again.

We have Bush as Hoover, and Obama as Roosevelt, both creating exactly the same mistakes as their predecessors for exactly the same reasons; to please the crowd.

It is only when we have put these Keynesian myths about the 1930s depression to bed, that we will finally be able to tackle our own depression, rather than simply repeating these same mistakes of hamfisted government intervention.

The G20 conference will be a success if they do absolutely nothing, except perhaps to pledge the immediate contraction of all governments worldwide, and the funneling of all monies saved into the private hands of the world's population to spend in any way they see fit, whether this is as saving or as investment.

All the rest is just a democratic show of ineptitude.

By the way, have you ever heard of the depression of 1921? No. I thought not.

There was a panic in 1921 almost identical, if not worse, than the panic in 1929. This panic in 1921 was caused by the government inflation used to fund WWI.

So why didn't it turn into a depression? Because the American government and its Federal Reserve did absolutely nothing to solve this panic.

The whole crisis was over in one year flat.

Why do the Keynsians never talk about this non-existent depression? Perhaps they should.

(Just to be even-handed, here's my comment on Mr Martin's piece)

Jack Maturin on April 02, 2009 at 10:19 AM

Excellent article, Iain. Please keep them coming.