Daily Archives: July 14, 2009

The Great Depression debate

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This is my third blog entry in a row about economics.

If you have never lived through the Great Depression, it’s possible that you either don’t know what you are talking about, or are lying outright to promote some form of ideological extremism.

First look at this:

This is a video by Shane Killian, a Libertarian activist. While I admire the man for his work on defending evolution and attacking pseudoscience, he seems to be out of his league when it comes to economics, as the next video clearly shows:

Killian then proceeds to rewrite history regarding the Great Depression:

What bull$#it! Quite simply, if the New Deal was such a failure, then why did FDR not become a one term President?. Why, indeed, was he elected no less than FOUR TIMES!?

Because the Great Depression was the worst economic crisis ever in American history, it may be considered uncharted territory. Our government had to experiment to find a solution. Some things attempted during the Great Depression worked better than others, but it was hardly true that the New Deal was a total failure and that World War II finally got us out of the Depression! Indeed, if our economy had not recovered to a reasonable degree by 1941, we would never have been able to wage World War II so well! The right-wing extremists got the issue EXACTLY backwards! War is more likely to destroy a struggling economy than to strengthen it!

So why did Killain make the claims he did? Two reasons.

  1. He is a Libertarian. While the ideals of free market economics promoted by that party are indeed admirable, they are also purely a theroetical concept. In the real world, a completely free market CANNOT EXIST FOREVER! If you allow a capitalist economy to run on its own without any government intervention, we will only fall into a depression eventually and stay there PERMENANTLY! Killian’s faith in the “free market” is no better than religious fanaticism.
  2. He is brilliant on some subjects, therefore he assumes that he must be right on ALL subjects. But that is simply not true of anyone. No one knows or understands everything equally well. Myself included.