Zonie63
Posts: 2826
Joined: 4/25/2011
From: The Old Pueblo
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quote:
ORIGINAL: joether
As much as I hate the Republican Party of today, its not the same one from the 1920's and 1930's. Things were handled much differently on a wide scale of issues, ideas, and principles. Likewise, blaming the whole of the Great Depression on three guys is quite a bit of ignorance on your part. The President does not set the rules by which companies conduct business. That would be the job of....wait for it.....CONGRESS.
Just for the record, the Republicans controlled both Houses of Congress all through the 1920s. However, I would agree that it's an oversimplification to blame the entire Depression on just three guys or even one party. In the period between the Civil War and the First World War, the Republicans held the upper hand for the most part, as the Democrats were still divided and in a bit of a mess. Cleveland and Wilson were the only Democrats to be elected President during that time frame. It was a period of sweatshops, labor unrest, also characterized by ardent patriotism and nationalism. It was also when American imperialism was in full swing in both Latin America and East Asia.
One might well wonder how a nation which had been growing by leaps and bounds, with millions of acres of arable land and a cornucopia of resources, an industrial powerhouse with a burgeoning global empire, could ever fall on such hard times. You'd expect it in resource-poor nations like Germany and Japan, but not in the United States (or even Britain or France with their huge empires and resource bases). It was bad management, plain and simple.
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Congress failed to place prudent structure and rules around the conduction of business transactions from loans to 'selling short'. In effect, the market behaved in a much more wild format compared to today's standards. Many people in the '40s on up to the '90s place an abundant number of rules, regulations and regulators in place to keep the market place from spiraling out of control that quickly. In fact, in 'today' terms, there are automatic 'shut off' marks that close the market if it drops by so much or so quickly.
Enter the 'enlighten' conservatives of the late '90s on into the present. They removed many of those regulations and regulators.
I would put it a bit earlier, probably in the early 80s and the rise of the Reagan Robots. That's when deregulation and privatization became the popular buzzwords among fiscal conservatives.
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Shortly after the new millennium started, many Americans across the country saw ads for "If you have bad, worst, or no credit, you can get a house loan!". There was a reason why one could not get a loan for a house (a big ticket item) for having bad credit; chance of default was arguably high. What happened to the housing market in 2006? It tanked. The problem here is that most people do not have a clue....WHY...those regulations were put in place in the first place. That depth of ignorance has cost this nation greatly.
Overall, I find that the public has an incredibly short attention-span and a poor collective memory. Ignorance may also play a role, but there's a great deal of apathy as well. Many people just plain don't care. They care more about celebrity gossip and other such fluff than they do about the state of affairs in this country. Any topic of a serious nature is just too "booooring" for a lot of people.
Economics is a complex field of study, so I can't say that I blame people for not understanding it at an academic level, but so many people don't even bother to try.
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Taking an 'Armchair Quarterback' position to rail three former US Presidents is pretty unfair. They did not have the knowledge of what could happen in exact terms. They might have had a ballpark idea, but figured 'the market would correct itself'. That there was no problems with capitalism.
I think it's quite fair to rail against former U.S. Presidents if they didn't do a very good job. Harding presided over a very corrupt administration and is generally regarded as a "failure" among U.S. Presidents, along with two other Republicans, Grant and Nixon.
I would agree that Hoover was unfairly blamed for the Depression, although it's understandable since he was in the hot seat at the time.
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In 2008, most of those with a heart beat found the major fault of capitalism: greed.
Some of us realized it long before then.
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By itself, there is not mechanism in capitalism to control greed from getting out of control.
In practice, probably not. However, the assumption of capitalism is that free and open competition would be a natural form of checks and balances in the market to keep abuses from getting out of hand. Of course, that would mean that everyone has to play fair, as Dr. Philip Barbay pointed out in the movie Back to School:
"That will be quite enough, Mr. Melon! Maybe bribes, kickbacks and Mafia payoffs are how YOU do business! But they are NOT part of the legitimate business world!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlVDGmjz7eM
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During the Reagan administration, the country experienced a very good economy.
I think the country was experiencing a cocaine high during the Reagan Administration, but just because something feels good doesn't mean that it's actually "good."
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