Just curious what succinct answers you guys had for why the stock market boomed in the 1920s before collapsing in 1929.
I don't think that the boom that lead up to the great depression was really all that great in terms of its artificialness. I believe that what really caused the great depression to be great were the policies after the crash, no? The propping up of prices and expansion of gov't, all the new regulations and interventions into the economy.
Another year, another unit on the Depression so more bragging.
Question: Explain Hoover and FDR's theories on how to fix the Great Depression.
Answer (from a 7th grader): Hoover and FDR both had similar theories for helping the economy. Hoover cut tax rates 1% but increased government spending by 40%. By the end of his term he had turned a $700 surplus into a $2.6 billion dollar deficit. FDR also wanted high government spending He kept the US in debt. FDR also created amyn agencies to help the people.He believed "energetic government" was the best way to go.
It sounds like you're doing some great work and your students seem very intelligent. One thing to point out is that the Great Depression did not directly result from the market crash of '29. To quote Thomas Sowell in Economic Facts and Fallacies : "Unemployment peaked at 9 percent, two months after the stock market crashed, and began drifting generally downward until it reached 6.3 percent in June 1930. That was when the federal government made its first major intervention into the economy, with the Smoot-Hawley tariff."
Also another concise resource you could use - http://c457332.r32.cf2.rackcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/GreatMyths2011FINALweb.pdf
@ Aristippus
Are you sure that quote is from Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies? I read that one just recently, but I can't remember him speaking about the great depression in it. Can you tell me the page number?
Sure - p. 9 of mine (second edition). He uses it as an example of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Right! I discovered now that its actually easy to find if I had used the index and looked for "Great Depression"... Silly me...
Thanks Aristippus!
Also, Glass-Stegall wasn't in effect, so banks could gamble away savings they didn't own.
Which, if you look at the stats, they did not. G/S was more or less unnecessary.
I think that's one of the main corrupting factors (and goals) of state education; they teach particular interpretations of history as indisputable fact. Anyone who questions those conclusions is told to "go back to school". The ideas Mises presents in "Theory and History" are some of the most important I've learned with respect to understanding society and acquiring knowledge in general.
Indeed - he who controls the past controls the future. Which is why one of the first moves made by our current banker-oligarchy when it was nascent in the early 20th century was to take control of the American Historical Association and alter the curriculum and teaching methods...this was something uncovered in the Reese Committee Hearings on the tax-exempt foundations...the Ford Foundation in this case, I believe. And of course per "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" by Charlotte Iserbyt, public education in America was from the very beginning about conditioning obedient/useful citizens, not about education, and was pushed by the same interests, via the same foundations - in general, the Rockefeller Foundation and its offspring dominated the movement toward public education.
Anyone interested in the subject absolutely must read "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America." It is not half-baked conspiracy theory, it's several hundred pages of direct quotes from historical documents with complete citations - and they speak for themselves. There's really no rational basis for denying the thesis of the book, which is what I said above - namely, that public education is about conditioning obedient/useful citizens for a socialistic society, not educating people, and that it was foisted on us by a galaxy of foundations ultimately controlled by that handful of bankers we keep running into everywhere we go.
...them be the facts - pardon my grammar, went to public school doncha know....