This is the first article I'm posting in a category I have named Fedonomics. You will see why in time .
One common guiding assumption characterized the Keynesians, socialists, and fascists of the 1930s: that laissez-faire,
free-market capitalism had been the touchstone of the US economy during the
1920s, and that this old-fashioned form of capitalism had manifestly failed us
by generating, or at least allowing, the most catastrophic depression in
history to strike at the United States and the entire Western world.
Well, weren’t the 1920s, with their burgeoning optimism,
their speculation, their enshrinement of big business in politics, their
Republican dominance, their individualism, their hedonistic cultural decadence,
weren’t these years indeed the heyday of laissez-faire? Certainly the decade
looked that way to most observers, and hence it was natural that the free
market should take the blame for the consequences of unbridled capitalism in
1929 and after.
Unfortunately for the course of history, the common
interpretation was dead wrong: there was very little
laissez-faire capitalism in the 1920s. Indeed the opposite was true:
significant parts of the economy were infused with proto–New Deal statism, a
statism that plunged us into the Great Depression and prolonged this miasma for
more than a decade.
Reliving
the Crash of ‘29 – LewRockwell.com
