The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Great Depression and the New Deal
by Robert P. Murphy
Paperback - 272 pages
Everything They Say About the Great Depression and the New Deal is Wrong
No economic myth these days is more pernicious than the myth that the free market caused the Great Depression and the New Deal got us out of it. That, as economist Robert P. Murphy points out is flat-out false. In The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal he provides irrefutable evidence that not only did government interference with the market cause the Great Depression (and our current economic collapse), but Herbert Hoover’s and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s big government policies afterwards made it much longer and much worse (just as President Barack Obama’s extraordinary expansion of government promises to do today). Perhaps even more compelling, Murphy exposes the untold story behind the New Deal—how it operated by force, and why what’s really at stake is not only our economy but our liberty. The real “lessons of the Great Depression” are not what you’ve been taught.
* The Crash of ‘29 was caused not by capitalism, but by the boom brought on by the newly created Federal Reserve’s easy money policy (sound familiar?)
* Hoover made the Depression “Great” precisely by abandoning the laissez-faire approach that previous presidents had followed and that kept depressions short
* The bank runs of the 1930s were caused by government intervention in the banking system
* Government efforts to prop up wages and prices led to a full decade of double-digit unemployment
* FDR’s arbitrary policies toward businessmen resulted in net investment of less than zero for much of the Depression
Might Barack Obama be the new FDR? You’ll know, after reading The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal that if he is, that’s nothing to celebrate.
Robert P. Murphy earned his Ph.D. in economics from New York University. A former professor at Hillsdale College, he is now an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a senior fellow in business and economic studies at the Pacific Research Institute, and an economist with both the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the Institute for Energy Research. He has testified before Congress on economic issues, and has worked as both an investment/business analyst and as a journalist. He is a frequent radio guest and writes a column for Townhall.com. He lives with his wife and son in Nashville, Tennessee.