What Most People Don’t Know About Our 250-Year History, Part I
The post What Most People Don’t Know About Our 250-Year History, Part I appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. The Fed allowed one-third of U.S. banks to fail during the Depression. FPG/Hulton Archive. Getty Images As we approach our country’s 250th birthday, there is no better time to reflect on where we have been and how we got here. Yet Americans are surprisingly ignorant about our past. One reason: So much bad history has entered the popular culturecourtesy of bad historians, a few bad economists, and some talented writers like Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair, who didn’t understand history or economics at all. To remedy this problem, I highly recommend The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Myths of American Capitalism by Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux. Gramm is a former U.S. senator and Boudreaux is a professor of economics at George Mason University. Together they have combed through the scholarly literature and savagely dismantled myths about our economic history – myths that are routinely taught in high schools and colleges across the country. In this essay, I will address two severe economic downturns: the Great Depression and the more recent Great Recession. The Great Depression There are five myths here, beginning with the assertion that the depression was caused by capitalism and greed. Put differently, it’s the idea that the worst economic downturn in our country’s history occurred because of too much individual freedom and too little government. In contrast, the authors write, What failed in the 1930s was not capitalism. What failed was the American government. In its conduct of monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy, it turned what would have been an ordinary recession into a depression that became the most traumatic economic experience in our nation’s history. The worst failure was that of the Federal Reserve System, created to be a lender of last resort, providing liquidity to banks in times of a credit…
The post What Most People Don’t Know About Our 250-Year History, Part I appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
The Fed allowed one-third of U.S. banks to fail during the Depression. FPG/Hulton Archive. Getty Images As we approach our country’s 250th birthday, there is no better time to reflect on where we have been and how we got here. Yet Americans are surprisingly ignorant about our past. One reason: So much bad history has entered the popular culturecourtesy of bad historians, a few bad economists, and some talented writers like Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair, who didn’t understand history or economics at all. To remedy this problem, I highly recommend The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Myths of American Capitalism by Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux. Gramm is a former U.S. senator and Boudreaux is a professor of economics at George Mason University. Together they have combed through the scholarly literature and savagely dismantled myths about our economic history – myths that are routinely taught in high schools and colleges across the country. In this essay, I will address two severe economic downturns: the Great Depression and the more recent Great Recession. The Great Depression There are five myths here, beginning with the assertion that the depression was caused by capitalism and greed. Put differently, it’s the idea that the worst economic downturn in our country’s history occurred because of too much individual freedom and too little government. In contrast, the authors write, What failed in the 1930s was not capitalism. What failed was the American government. In its conduct of monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy, it turned what would have been an ordinary recession into a depression that became the most traumatic economic experience in our nation’s history. The worst failure was that of the Federal Reserve System, created to be a lender of last resort, providing liquidity to banks in times of a credit…
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