...many people today continue to accept critiques of free-market capitalism that are unjustified and support government policies that are economically destructive.
“The terror of the Great Crash has been the failure to explain it,' writes economist Alan Reynolds.
Old myths never die; they just keep showing up in economics and political science textbooks. With only an occasional exception, it is there you will find what may be the twentieth century’s greatest myth: Capitalism and the free-market economy were responsible for the Great Depression, and only government intervention brought about America’s economic recovery.
The Great Depression was not the country’s first depression, though it proved to be the longest. Several others preceded it. The calamity that began in 1929 lasted at least three times longer than any of the country’s previous depressions because the government compounded its initial errors with a series of additional and harmful interventions.
Regarding Fed policy, free market economists who differ on the extent of the Fed’s monetary expansion of the early and mid-‘20s are of one view about what happened next: The central bank presided over a dramatic contraction of the money supply that began late in the decade. The federal government’s responses to the resulting recession took a bad situation and made it far, far worse.
The central bank took further deflationary action by aggressively selling government securities for months after the stock market crashed. For the next three years, the money supply shrank by 30 percent. As prices then tumbled throughout the economy, the Fed’s higher interest rate policy boosted real (inflation-adjusted) rates dramatically.
The distortions in the economy promoted by the Fed’s monetary policy had set the country up for a recession, but other impositions to come would soon turn the recession into a full-scale disaster.
On the very morning of Black Thursday, the nation’s newspapers reported that the political forces for higher trade-damaging tariffs were making gains on Capitol Hill.
The stock market crash was only a reflection — not the direct cause of the destructive government policies that would ultimately produce the Great Depression: The market rose and fell in almost direct synchronization with what the Fed and Congress were doing. And what they did in the 1930s ranks way up there in the annals of history’s greatest follies.
Though modern myth claims that the free market “self-destructed' in 1929, government policy was the debacle’s principal culprit. If this crash had been like previous ones, the hard times would have ended in two or three years at the most, and likely sooner than that. But unprecedented political bungling instead prolonged the misery for over 10 years.
Did Hoover really subscribe to a “hands-off-the-economy,' free-market philosophy? His opponent in the 1932 election, Franklin Roosevelt, didn’t think so. During the campaign, Roosevelt blasted Hoover for spending and taxing too much, boosting the national debt, choking off trade, and putting millions on the dole. He accused the president of “reckless and extravagant' spending, of thinking “that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible,' and of presiding over “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.' Roosevelt’s running mate, John Nance Garner, charged that Hoover was “leading the country down the path of socialism."
The crowning folly of the Hoover administration was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, passed in June 1930. The most protectionist legislation in U.S. history, Smoot-Hawley virtually closed the borders to foreign goods and ignited a vicious international trade war. Trade is ultimately a two-way street; if foreigners cannot sell their goods here, then they cannot earn the dollars they need to buy here. Or, to put it another way, government cannot shut off imports without simultaneously shutting off exports.
American agriculture was particularly hard hit. With a stroke of the presidential pen, farmers in this country lost nearly a third of their markets. With the collapse of agriculture, rural banks failed in record numbers, dragging down hundreds of thousands of their customers. Nine thousand banks closed their doors in the United States between 1930 and 1933.
Smoot-Hawley by itself should lay to rest the myth that Hoover was a free market practitioner, but there is even more to the story of his administration’s interventionist mistakes. Within a month of the stock market crash, he convened conferences of business leaders for the purpose of jawboning them into keeping wages artificially high even though both profits and prices were falling. As economist Richard Ebeling notes, “The ‘high‑wage 'policy of the Hoover administration and the trade unions ... succeeded only in pricing workers out of the labor market, generating an increasing circle of unemployment.”
Hoover dramatically increased government spending for subsidy and relief schemes.
Commenting decades later on Hoover’s administration, Rexford Guy Tugwell, one of the architects of Franklin Roosevelt’s policies of the 1930s, explained, “We didn’t admit it at the time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.”
Though Hoover at first did lower taxes for the poorest of Americans, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen in their sweeping A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror stress that he “offered no incentives to the wealthy to invest in new plants to stimulate hiring.” He even taxed bank checks, “which accelerated the decline in the availability of money by penalizing people for writing checks."
In September 1931, with the money supply tumbling and the economy reeling from the impact of Smoot-Hawley, the Fed imposed the biggest hike in its discount rate in history. Bank deposits fell 15 percent within four months and sizable, deflationary declines in the nation’s money supply persisted through the first half of 1932.
Compounding the error of high tariffs, huge subsidies, and deflationary monetary policy, Congress then passed and Hoover signed the Revenue Act of 1932. The largest tax increase in peacetime history, it doubled the income tax. The top bracket actually more than doubled, soaring from 24 percent to 63 percent.
Can any serious scholar observe the Hoover administration’s massive economic intervention and, with a straight face, pronounce the inevitably deleterious effects as the fault of free markets?
Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election in a landslide, collecting 472 electoral votes to just 59 for the incumbent Herbert Hoover. The platform of the Democratic Party, whose ticket Roosevelt headed, declared, “We believe that a party platform is a covenant with the people to be faithfully kept by the party entrusted with power.” It called for a 25-percent reduction in federal spending, a balanced federal budget, a sound gold currency “to be preserved at all hazards,” the removal of government from areas that belonged more appropriately to private enterprise, and an end to the “extravagance” of Hoover’s farm programs. This is what candidate Roosevelt promised, but it bears no resemblance to what President Roosevelt actually delivered.
Roosevelt did indeed make a difference, though probably not the sort of difference for which the country had hoped. As a result of his efforts, the economy would linger in depression for the rest of the decade.
...as Dr. Hans Sennholz of Grove City College explains, it was FDR’s policies to come that Americans had genuine reason to fear: In his first 100 days, he swung hard at the profit order. Instead of clearing away the prosperity barriers erected by his predecessor, he built new ones of his own.
Frustrated and angered that Roosevelt had so quickly and thoroughly abandoned the platform on which he was elected, Director of the Bureau of the Budget Lewis W. Douglas resigned after only one year on the job. At Harvard University in May 1935, Douglas made it plain that America was facing a momentous choice: Will we choose to subject ourselves — this great country — to the despotism of bureaucracy, controlling our every act, destroying what equality we have attained, reducing us eventually to the condition of impoverished slaves of the state? Or will we cling to the liberties for which man has struggled for more than a thousand years? It is important to understand the magnitude of the issue before us. ... If we do not elect to have a tyrannical, oppressive bureaucracy controlling our lives, destroying progress, depressing the standard of living ... then should it not be the function of the Federal government under a democracy to limit its activities to those which a democracy may adequately deal, such for example as national defense, maintaining law and order, protecting life and property, preventing dishonesty, and ... guarding the public against ... vested special interests?
Economist Jim Powell ... points out that “Almost all the failed banks were in states with unit banking laws” — laws that prohibited banks from opening branches and thereby diversifying their portfolios and reducing their risks. Powell writes: “Although the United States, with its unit banking laws, had thousands of bank failures, Canada, which permitted branch banking, didn’t have a single failure ...” Strangely, critics of capitalism who love to blame the market for the Depression never mention that fact.
Congress gave the president the power first to seize the private gold holdings of American citizens and then to fix the price of gold. Washington and its reckless central bank had already made mincemeat of the gold standard by the early 1930s.
In the first year of the New Deal, Roosevelt proposed spending $10 billion while revenues were only $3 billion. Between 1933 and 1936, government expenditures rose by more than 83 percent.
The minimum wage law prices many of the inexperienced, the young, the unskilled, and the disadvantaged out of the labor market. (For example, the minimum wage provisions passed as part of another act in 1933 threw an estimated 500,000 blacks out of work).
Roosevelt secured passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which levied a new tax on agricultural processors and used the revenue to supervise the wholesale destruction of valuable crops and cattle. Federal agents oversaw the ugly spectacle of perfectly good fields of cotton, wheat, and corn being plowed under (the mules had to be convinced to trample the crops; they had been trained, of course, to walk between the rows). Healthy cattle, sheep, and pigs were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace personally gave the order to slaughter six million baby pigs before they grew to full size. The administration also paid farmers for the first time for not working at all.
...created a massive new bureaucracy called the National Recovery Administration. Under the NRA, most manufacturing industries were suddenly forced into government-mandated cartels. Codes that regulated prices and terms of sale briefly transformed much of the American economy into a fascist-style arrangement, while the NRA was financed by new taxes on the very industries it controlled. Some economists have estimated that the NRA boosted the cost of doing business by an average of 40 percent — not something a depressed economy needed for recovery.
Benjamin M. Anderson writes, “NRA was not a revival measure. It was an antirevival measure. ... Through the whole of the NRA period industrial production did not rise as high as it had been in July 1933, before NRA came in.”
Roosevelt next signed into law steep income tax increases on the higher brackets and introduced a five-percent withholding tax on corporate dividends. He secured another tax increase in 1934. In fact, tax hikes became a favorite policy of Roosevelt for the next ten years, culminating in a top income tax rate of 90 percent. Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who opposed much of the New Deal, lambasted Roosevelt’s massive tax increases. A sound economy would not be restored, he said, by following the socialist notion that America could “lift the lower one-third up” by pulling “the upper two-thirds down.”
Alphabet commissars spent the public’s money like it was so much bilge. They were what influential journalist and social critic Albert Jay Nock had in mind when he described the New Deal as “a nationwide, State-managed mobilization of inane buffoonery and aimless commotion.”
Roosevelt has been lauded for his “job-creating” acts such as the CWA and the WPA. Many people think that they helped relieve the Depression. What they fail to realize is that it was the rest of Roosevelt’s tinkering that prolonged the Depression and which largely prevented the jobless from finding real jobs in the first place. The stupefying roster of wasteful spending generated by these jobs programs represented a diversion of valuable resources to politically motivated and economically counterproductive purposes.
...a (make-work)tax-supported paycheck cannot be counted as a net increase to the economy because the wealth used to pay him was simply diverted, not created. Economists today must still battle this “magical thinking” every time more government spending is proposed — as if money comes not from productive citizens, but rather from the tooth fairy.
...the great majority of Americans were patient. They wanted very much to give this charismatic polio victim and former New York governor the benefit of the doubt. But Roosevelt always had his critics, and they would grow more numerous as the years groaned on.
Mencken excelled himself in attacking the triumphant FDR, whose whiff of fraudulent collectivism filled him with genuine disgust.
The American economy was soon relieved of the burden of some of the New Deal’s worst excesses when the Supreme Court outlawed the NRA in 1935 and the AAA in 1936, earning Roosevelt’s eternal wrath and derision.
Freed from the worst of the New Deal, the economy showed some signs of life. Unemployment dropped to 18 percent in 1935, 14 percent in 1936, and even lower in 1937. But by 1938, it was back up to nearly 20 percent as the economy slumped again. The stock market crashed nearly 50 percent between August 1937 and March 1938. The “economic stimulus” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal had achieved a real “first”: a depression within a depression!
Businessmen, Roosevelt fumed, were obstacles on the road to recovery. He blasted them as “economic royalists” and said that businessmen as a class were “stupid.” He followed up the insults with a rash of new punitive measures. New strictures on the stock market were imposed. A tax on corporate retained earnings, called the “undistributed profits tax,” was levied. “These soak-the‑rich efforts,” writes economist Robert Higgs, “left little doubt that the president and his administration intended to push through Congress everything they could to extract wealth from the high-income earners responsible for making the bulk of the nation’s decisions about private investment.”
Columnist Walter Lippmann wrote in March 1938 that “with almost no important exception every measure he [Roosevelt] has been interested in for the past five months has been to reduce or discourage the production of wealth.”
As pointed out earlier in this essay, Herbert Hoover’s own version of a “New Deal” had hiked the top marginal income tax rate from 24 to 63 percent in 1932. But he was a piker compared to his tax-happy successor. Under Roosevelt, the top rate was raised at first to 79 percent and then later to 90 percent. Economic historian Burton Folsom notes that in 1941 Roosevelt even proposed a whopping 99.5-percent marginal rate on all incomes over $100,000. “Why not?” he said when an advisor questioned the idea.
After that confiscatory proposal failed, Roosevelt issued an executive order to tax all income over $25,000 at the astonishing rate of 100 percent. He also promoted the lowering of the personal exemption to only $600, a tactic that pushed most American families into paying at least some income tax for the first time. Shortly thereafter, Congress rescinded the executive order but went along with the reduction of the personal exemption.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve again seesawed its monetary policy in the mid-‘30s, first up then down, then up sharply through America’s entry into World War II. Contributing to the economic slide of 1937 was this fact: From the summer of 1936 to the spring of 1937, the Fed doubled reserve requirements on the nation’s banks.
...Roosevelt tried in 1937 to “pack” the Supreme Court ...Until Congress killed the packing scheme, however, business fears that a Court sympathetic to Roosevelt’s goals would endorse more of the old New Deal prevented investment and confidence from reviving.
The relentless assaults of the Roosevelt administration — in both word and deed — against business, property, and free enterprise guaranteed that the capital needed to jump-start the economy was either taxed away or forced into hiding. Not until both Roosevelt and the war were gone did investors feel confident enough to “set in motion the postwar investment boom that powered the economy’s return to sustained prosperity.”
Lummot du Pont, offered in 1937: Uncertainty rules the tax situation, the labor situation, the monetary situation, and practically every legal condition under which industry must operate.
Many modern historians tend to be reflexively anti-capitalist and distrustful of free markets; they find Roosevelt’s exercise of power, constitutional or not, to be impressive and historically “interesting.” In surveys, a majority consistently rank FDR near the top of the list for presidential greatness, so it is likely they would disdain the notion that the New Deal was responsible for prolonging the Great Depression. But when a nationally representative poll by the American Institute of Public Opinion in the spring of 1939 asked, “Do you think the attitude of the Roosevelt administration toward business is delaying business recovery?” the American people responded “yes” by a margin of more than two-to-one. The business community felt even more strongly so.
How was it that FDR was elected four times if his policies were deepening and prolonging an economic catastrophe? Ignorance and a willingness to give the president the benefit of the doubt explain a lot. Roosevelt beat Hoover in 1932 with promises of less government. He instead gave Americans more government, but he did so with fanfare and fireside chats that mesmerized a desperate people. By the time they began to realize that his policies were harmful, World War II came, the people rallied around their commander-in-chief, and there was little desire to change the proverbial horse in the middle of the stream by electing someone new.
...the Truman administration that followed Roosevelt was decidedly less eager to berate and bludgeon private investors and as a result, those investors re-entered the economy and fueled a powerful postwar boom. The Great Depression finally ended, but it should linger in our minds today as one of the most colossal and tragic failures of government and public policy in American history.
The genesis of the Great Depression lay in the irresponsible monetary and fiscal policies of the U.S. government in the late 1920s and early 1930s. These policies included a litany of political missteps: central bank mismanagement, trade-crushing tariffs, incentive-sapping taxes, mind-numbing controls on production and competition, senseless destruction of crops and cattle, and coercive labor laws, to recount just a few. It was not the free market which produced 12 years of agony; rather, it was political bungling on a grand scale.
Those who can survey the events of the 1920s and 1930s and blame free-market capitalism for the economic calamity have their eyes, ears, and minds firmly closed to the facts. Changing the wrong-headed thinking that constitutes much of today’s conventional wisdom about this sordid historical episode is vital to reviving faith in free markets and preserving our liberties.
The nation managed to survive both Hoover’s activism and Roosevelt’s New Deal quackery, and now the American heritage of freedom awaits a rediscovery by a new generation of citizens. This time we have nothing to fear but myths and misconceptions.
