'We're on the verge of a great, great depression'

[laikaNYC]

Libertarianism is a pile of nonsense.

Says the Socialist.

The two countries in Europe with the disastrous economies on the verge of collapsing are Greece and Spain. Both of their economies are run by you guessed it - Socialist leaders.

The mistake President Obama is making is that he believes the federal government can control economic growth. It can't. Only the private sector can do so.

I do believe that both Obama and Bush were correct in supplying taxpayer money to keep the banking system from collapsing. Obama was also right in lending some American corporations cash to recover. Apparently most of the TARP funds have now been paid back ahead of schedule. But the president's overall economic philosophy is driving us further into the ditch. He just can't get off his social justice kick and doesn't have a clue on how to reform things like Medicare. At least the Republican's actually have a plan.

Obama hasn't put forth any economic plan other than this: Tax the Rich.

Raising taxes on the affluent, including small business owners who hire people does just the opposite. If you want more jobs, you must give business incentives to hire, not take more money away from the entrepreneurial class.

 

[Kulindahr]

I thought it might be more prudent to go back to basics because it is obviously beyond you that the Federal Reserve was responsible for the Great Depression. The crash in 1929 was followed by, what, 5 years (?) of reckless credit expansion. Even before that, in the years 1819–1820, 1839–1843, 1857–1860, 1873–1878, 1893–1897, and 1920–1921, the government had been responsible for artificially generating booms through easy money and credit and in each case, an inevitable bust followed.

The initial crash is the bursting of an unsustainable bubble caused by inflation of the money supply. The fact that it lasted so long is due to government efforts to revive the economy, including protectionism, price fixing, public works projects and deficit spending.

Partly responsible, yes. But easy credit wouldn't have done the damage it did without greedy idiots leading the ignorant but trusting to build a pyramid of marbles held together by axle grease.

Credit expansion isn't evil; it's one of those things that depends on the circumstances -- sort of like putting fuel on a fire. If the fire is doing fine, keeping the house warm, adding fuel is both wasteful and foolish; but if the house is chilly, adding fuel is a proper corrective.

But a big part of the problem is perception. With a fire in your house, if people think it isn't warm enough, you may get yelled at for not doing the right thing. With a depression, it's the same. In fact, you may very well be doing the right thing, but not enough of it, and that gets you in trouble -- in the case of a president, it can mean losing an election.

If you look at the Great Depression honestly, it's clear that Hoover was doing the right things -- but nowhere near enough of them. To use the home fire illustration, he was suddenly faced with the fire dying out almost totally, and his response was to lay on a little kindling and blow on the wood -- a move in the right direction, but the people who have already put on their third layer of clothes aren't going to be terribly thrilled by the difference.

The way to tell the difference is to look at where the money is going in your credit expansion. If it's dollars chasing dollars just to breed more dollars, it's like tossing stove wood on the fire; when you reach a certain point, the pile will roar into an inferno that consumes the whole heap so rapidly the fuel is gone in a flash and the heat is so bad you can't get in to fix things. If the dollars are going to an apparently sound activity (e.g. buying homes) but without the money flow to sustain the scheme, it's similar, except the crash doesn't come quite so swiftly -- what it does is keep going on and on until it's evident that everything that's going to 'burn' has done so.

The other side of that is if your money supply is plunging, credit expansion is a good thing, because a shrinking money supply is like pulling fuel off the fire


Just got a call; gotta go, so I'm cutting this short. At any rate, the government was not totally responsible for the Great Depression; it was a facilitator to fools.

 

[laikaNYC]

Says the republican apologist.

LOL. You would try that typical line. For one, Spain is suffering because of the unregulated housing market (sound familiar?). The policies of former conservative leader Jose Maria Aznar, close Bush ally by the way, caused the economic crisis. Spain had an artificially inflated economic growth because of an unregulated housing and financial market. You are going to try to somehow turn this on Zapatero, and that makes zero sense.

And Greece was run by a right wing military dictatorship for years. They've had economic problems for decades. This isn't anything new.

The only thing that will save Spain and Greece is Keynesian economic policy and major government intervention. Anything less would be a scam. Certainly not the austerity bullsh*t that is being proposed right now.

Are you kidding me? You're blaming Greece's economic woes on the nearly 40-year-old Military Junta? A quick Google search will tell you that the economy actually thrived during the Junta rule. It wasn't until Socialist Papandreou was elected PM a few years ago that the economy really began to take a turn for the worse.

The Greek government spent years erecting comfy social safety nets.

If you're a Greek citizen, you get free education, including college. You get free health care. You get a generous pension. The average retirement age is only 53. You get six weeks of paid vacation each year. Also, many Greeks don't pay any taxes.

Accept the fact that Greece's social programs have bankrupted the country. Hopefully Europe will learn that the cradle to the grave government benefits eventually prove to be unafforadble. Spain, Italy, and Portugal are also weighed down with debt loads from those same benefit programs.

But i'm guessing right-wingers Franco, Mussolini, and Salazar are to blame, right?

 

[pinkballoons]

It's obvious you don't quite grasp the issues. What happened in 1929, was unregulated capitalism.

You, unlike me, have made an assertion without backing it up, unlike me. I'll choose to ignore this.

Regardless, free market capitalism (initially) is the reason why America became the top dogs of the world. Now the US basically a socialist state lol. You've only to look at the burgeoning middle classes in China and India and soon to be Vietnam and other Asian nations to see the incredible benefits the free trade of labor and capital allows.

That's what led to the crash and the depression. You're absolutely wrong on the other exmples. The econmoic crash of 1893 was basically caused by the gold standard. It wasn't the government. It was the private sector that was at fault.

First of all, have you ever read or even picked up an economics book in your entire life (and I certainly do mean more than the blurb of Communist Manifesto?

I don't know much about the 1893 crash, but I imagine that because of the National Bank system, the money supply (M2) rose throughout the 1880s. Which was followed by a concentrated inflationary burst provided by the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890. As with the tech and housing bubbles, easy money will tend to blow up bubbles in specific sectors. The monetary expansion of the 1880s and early 90s happened to blow up a massive railroad bubble which popped in 1893.

People like to blame things and then post an argument without fully understanding the facts. Your insult in the original post shows you don't have an argument. And then you make the silly, unsupported claim that government efforts to revive the economy made the Great Depression longer. That's just utter baloney.

Please get a real argument that isn't entirely based on WIKIPEDIA articles (that don't really prove anything).

Um okay. It's quite obvious that people like you aren't into studying business cycle theories, the inner working of the banking system, and money supply statistics, and "it was the greedy dirty bourgeois" is a short and simple answer with a convenient scape-goat.


While I may have insulted you with the wikipedia articles initially, I have provided a clear outline as to why the Depression happened, and have also outlined the role of the Federal Reserve (need I say that it was governmentally established in 1913?)

Furthermore, I don't base my arguments on wikipedia articles. I base them on the likes of Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises (do you know who they are lol)

 

[pinkballoons]

Partly responsible, yes. But easy credit wouldn't have done the damage it did without greedy idiots leading the ignorant but trusting to build a pyramid of marbles held together by axle grease.

Again the fault of the government. Many Americans are convinced that the Great Depression reflected the breakdown of an old economic order built on unhampered markets, unbridled competition, speculation, property rights, and the profit motive i.e. capitalism. Is this true? Almost certainly not on every metric.

Credit expansion isn't evil; it's one of those things that depends on the circumstances -- sort of like putting fuel on a fire. If the fire is doing fine, keeping the house warm, adding fuel is both wasteful and foolish; but if the house is chilly, adding fuel is a proper corrective.

But a big part of the problem is perception. With a fire in your house, if people think it isn't warm enough, you may get yelled at for not doing the right thing. With a depression, it's the same. In fact, you may very well be doing the right thing, but not enough of it, and that gets you in trouble -- in the case of a president, it can mean losing an election.

If you look at the Great Depression honestly, it's clear that Hoover was doing the right things -- but nowhere near enough of them. To use the home fire illustration, he was suddenly faced with the fire dying out almost totally, and his response was to lay on a little kindling and blow on the wood -- a move in the right direction, but the people who have already put on their third layer of clothes aren't going to be terribly thrilled by the difference.

The way to tell the difference is to look at where the money is going in your credit expansion. If it's dollars chasing dollars just to breed more dollars, it's like tossing stove wood on the fire; when you reach a certain point, the pile will roar into an inferno that consumes the whole heap so rapidly the fuel is gone in a flash and the heat is so bad you can't get in to fix things. If the dollars are going to an apparently sound activity (e.g. buying homes) but without the money flow to sustain the scheme, it's similar, except the crash doesn't come quite so swiftly -- what it does is keep going on and on until it's evident that everything that's going to 'burn' has done so.

The other side of that is if your money supply is plunging, credit expansion is a good thing, because a shrinking money supply is like pulling fuel off the fire


Just got a call; gotta go, so I'm cutting this short. At any rate, the government was not totally responsible for the Great Depression; it was a facilitator to fools.

Firstly, credit expansion is a bad bad thing. Sorry, I just don't believe in expanding credit beyond real savings.

As I have said before, the Depression 1929 is a result of 5 years of reckless credit expansion by the Federal Reserve under th Coolidge admin. What happened in 1924? A decline in business occurred and what was that followed by? The creation of $500million new credit ultimately resulting in a bank credit expansion of 4billion in less than a year. While the initial decline appeared good in the sense that initiated an economic boom and diverted the dip in 1924, the effects was ultimately disastrous. A further burst of inflation was launched in 1927 . The result? Total currency outside banks plus demand and time deposits in the United States increased from $44.51 billion at the end of June 1924, to $55.17 billion in 1929. The volume of farm and urban mortgages expanded from around ~17billion to 27billiob; similar expansions occuring in industrial, financial, state and local government indebtedness. Expansion in credit and money -> rapidly increasing stock + real estate prices.
The credit and money expansion was what made 1929 inevitable, since it always precipitate business maladjustments and malinvestments that must later be liquidated. Interest rates was artificially reduced and thus falsified, misguiding business owners in their investment decisions.
After an abortive attempt to stablise the economy in 1928, the federal reserve began to abandon its easy money policy - selling govt securities, halting credit expansion. In June, business activities began to recede. A high in the market was reached in september 19, but under the pressure of early selling, it began to decline for 5 weeks. The public nonetheless continued to trade, but when the trend began to dawn on more and more and more stockholders, the madly rushed in october to sell their stocks for whatever they could get. And boom, there's your depression.

Regarding Hoover, I think you are incorrect. The subsequent readjustment after the crash should have been easy, lasting less than a year. Hoover, under the influence of "new economics", urged businessmen not to cut prices, and not to reduce wages, but rather to increase capital outlay, wages among other spending, to increase or maintain purchasing power; as well as embarking upon deficit spending. Now what else happened in the 1930? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, raising tariff to incredibly high levels. Correct me if I'm wrong but the day that Act was announced, industrial stocks fell 20 points.

 

[Beanstalk]

One very important point that no one seems to have mentioned is that time lag of 25 - 30 years or more between a government policy or action and the appearance of the real consequences. Most people seem to have such a short frame of reference! This is why Reagan gets all the credit and Obama gets all the blame.

Another way of looking at the same issue is that it may take 30 years from the time an individual, corporation, or sovereign state is bankrupt and the time when they are unable to conceal it any longer by circulating debt. Corporations can survive longer at that game, and governments can seemingly sling bullshit loans forever -- but there is something very inexorable about mathematics -- an exponential curve, for example.

Let me put it this way: I hope no one reading this is holding any significant savings that would be adversely affected by a major collapse in the value of the US dollar. It has been declining steadily for years, and - short of divine intervention (or a substantial tax on the rich - ha, ha: fat chance!) it is going to go on emulating the Zimbabwe economic miracle.

 

[laikaNYC]

^Giancarlo, I was getting ready to parade Germany and France to Laika, but you did it quite well yourself.

One thing you'll notice about righties: they'll tell you what that they want you to see. They won't tell you about the things they DON'T want you to see—in this case, that's France and Germany.

At any rate, righties very seldom tell the truth.

Oh feel free to parade Germany and France! Prime examples of thriving economies by run by right-wingers! And the worst economies in Europe like Greece and Spain are run by die-hard left-wing socialists.

At the end of the day, years of unrestrained spending on social programs by irresponsible Socialist leaders, cheap lending and failure to implement financial reforms left Greece badly exposed when the global economic downturn struck. Their government is so corrupt that once the curtain was whisked away, we saw debt levels and deficits that far exceeded limits set by the eurozone.

 

[kallipolis]

My argument is grounded in Milton Keynes. I doubt you know who he is.

You mean John Maynard Keynes.(1)

Milton Keynes is a town in England.(2)

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes
(2)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Keynes

 

[maxpowr9]

No sir. I have provided numerous sources for my argument. You came in here insulting. I didn't see what the insult was, because your post was edited by a moderator. Then you use several "wikipedia" sources without explaining the relevance of them. Okay, you'll use wikipedia... fair enough. But explain why and how they are relevant to your argument.

No and no. America isn't not a socialist state. Not in any season of the word. America is a corporatist state. Major corporations get everything and the rich get away with anything in this country. If you have $$$ you're advantaged here, and you can influence interest groups that pressure Congressmen to do what you want. And Asian countries are a very bad example to cite. China is a environmental disaster, with close to 15% unemployment in Urban areas, and 25% employment in rural areas and smaller towns). India offers extensive social protection and benefits to its huge population, but still has major gaps between the rich and poor.

The gaps in India are downright huge. And Vietnam....

http://talk.onevietnam.org/vietnam’s-socialist-healthcare-system/

Vietnam is working on a universal health care system. The government says that this plan will cover all Vietnamese people, but will it be for the best. The National Health Security Office (NHSO) secretary-general Dr. Winai Swaasdivorn says that “Vietnam is going to send officials to Thailand to study how the health-insurance systems are working,” in order to create a secure government-run health care system for Vietnam. The government is intently studying Thailand’s health care system to model theirs after it—Thailand’s health care system currently covers 48 million citizens.
----
Bad example for you to use.

Here you are criticizing socialists, yet you turn around and cite socialist countries that want to implement extensive social security protections? What?

Certainly more then you might have. And I'm not a communist. That's a cheapshot. I'm also not against capitalism. I'm just in favor of a more regulated form of it, like in Germany and Scandinavia (Sweden in particular).

This is not entirely telling of what really happened. A lot of what happened in the 1893 crash was associated to the gold standard.

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whitten.panic.1893

http://www.ehow.com/about_5461010_factors-depression.html

"Because paper currency had to be backed by gold, people did not have much faith in paper currency and traded it in for specie. With gold reserves depleted, banks asked debtors to pay off their loans."

-----
The depression was also far more global then you may think.

But that's not my argument. The problem here is I think you're simply refusing to read what I have posted. I never said I was against capitalism. And while I claimed to a socialist (closer to social democrat in the European sense), I'm in favor of a more mixed system. Not all social democrats are against capitalism you know. They just want to use it in their favor. However, I'm also in favor of extensive social protection, including universal health care.

No you didn't. You really didn't. You didn't even make an argument. You only chose to engage in personal attacks. Your outline isn't clear at all. And my points stand.

More insults. My argument is grounded in Milton Keynes. I doubt you know who he is.

Even one you should have cited Adam Smith, is in favor of certain intervention in the economy.

GiancarloC, it must be lonely up on your cloud. First, you tout all these wondrous "social protection" programs in India and China yet all I have to do is slip a cop 40k rupees if I want to rape someone and nobody hears about it (not that I would do either of those things anyways). At least in the US, bribing a cop is illegal. One of my best friends is Vietnamese and the income disparity between the rich and poor is what undo any universal healthcare system.

One of my biggest pet peeves here is people who just throw around sources/links and then claim them without any sort of synopsis or self-analysis. The major problem with the gold standard and why it was abandoned was that it was tied into exchange rates and deliberate price fixing ($2=£1). With that said, it is disastrous for making any domestic monetary policy without disturbing the exchange rate/international market under the gold standard. If there is declining output and income (aka recession), the loss of gold under the gold standard would reduce the money supply; which in turn, increases interest rates, slows borrowing and spending and causes a further cyclical decline in output and spending. The only reason I so much about the stupid gold standard is that I deal with the rantings of a Ron Paul fanatic in college and the professor had to devote an entire class day to explaining how stupid he was.

Who is this Milton Keynes you speak of? There is Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes but no famous Economist named Milton Keynes. So who feels insulted now?

 

[Kulindahr]

. The belief that society is responsible for the well-being of its members is called solidarity, or Solidarität , and is a key concept of German social policy.

I read a fantastic article comparing this "solidarity" with the Polish "solidarity" of Lech Walesa. It fascinated me how many Western leaders considered Walesa such a "freedom fighter", yet reject a (arguably the) major premise of his movement: standing together and caring for one another.

Furthermore, I don't base my arguments on wikipedia articles. I base them on the likes of Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises (do you know who they are lol)

Oh, this should get interesting....

 

[Kulindahr]

Again the fault of the government. Many Americans are convinced that the Great Depression reflected the breakdown of an old economic order built on unhampered markets, unbridled competition, speculation, property rights, and the profit motive i.e. capitalism. Is this true? Almost certainly not on every metric.

People's individual economic decisions are not "the fault of the government". They own themselves, they own their actions; the responsibility cannot be shuffled off.

If a certain store sets out free pastry every day just as kids get off school, it's easy to say it's the store's fault the kids got fat. But it isn't: the kids chose to take free pastry.

Government was like that store: it set out 'free pastry', but the decisions to take advantage of the pastry came from self-owned individuals. Perhaps a more accurate way to describe the government's role would be to say it set up the conditions necessary to have a depression, remembering that those conditions were not sufficient to actually make one -- the rest was supplied by sovereign individuals acting on their own, without coercion.

 

[Kulindahr]

Oh feel free to parade Germany and France! Prime examples of thriving economies by run by right-wingers!

What right-wingers? Neither of those countries really has any. And if any who pass for right-wing there moved to the U.S., they'd be laughed at by the GOP as too far left for the Democrats.

 

[Kulindahr]

You mean John Maynard Keynes.(1)

Milton Keynes is a town in England.(2)

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes
(2)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Keynes

LMAO! You got me there.

That's called waking up too early without the morning coffee after a long night of clubbing.... and quite tired.

Thanks for the correction.

I don't know why I was thinking Milton Keynes... maybe I was reading a publication from England and it was mentioned in an article.

Can a moderator please correct that in my post lol?

That gave me a good chuckle.

Your subconscious was probably thinking of Milton Friedman, due to certain arguments you're posting counter to. So you took took economists, got a town in England, and had to be called in the morning.

At least you didn't mix them the other way -- "Maynard Friedman" sounds like a real snob.

 

[Kulindahr]

He's losing and he knows it, Kulindahr.

We could also have paraded Canada, which during a time of global recession, not only carries surplusses, but has no plans to dismantle its socialized medicine, thank you.

laika, look yourself in the mirror and admit it to yourselfe: sometimes socialism works, and sometimes it doesn't.

Let's help him out a little bit, boys: Why don't we point out to him that no other country has our defense budget needs?

Make that "imagined" defense budget needs. I just read another study by a libertarian/conservative think tank that concluded we could chop $360bn+/yr from the Pentagon without any loss of effectiveness -- and if we cut back to what the U.S. arguably needs for it own defense and security commitments, the figure would top $500bn/year.

The first one I believe; the second seems drastic -- isn't that over half what we spend on defense?

This is one big complaint I have with all the so-called libertarians in Congress: they worship not just corporations, but the military.

 

[JB3]

I assure you JB3 I was calm and relaxed when I typed that. Had had a good meal and nice bottle of wine. On the other hand, maybe the raw oysters had made me a little passionate.

Haha. I had missed this response! Its a gem.

 

[MoltenRock III]

LMAO! You got me there.

That's called waking up too early without the morning coffee after a long night of clubbing.... and quite tired.

Thanks for the correction.

I don't know why I was thinking Milton Keynes... maybe I was reading a publication from England and it was mentioned in an article.

Can a moderator please correct that in my post lol?

I think you were thinking Milton Friedman along with Keynes.

 

[pinkballoons]

No sir. I have provided numerous sources for my argument. You came in here insulting. I didn't see what the insult was, because your post was edited by a moderator. Then you use several "wikipedia" sources without explaining the relevance of them. Okay, you'll use wikipedia... fair enough. But explain why and how they are relevant to your argument.

You made an initial assertion that libertarians were to blame for the Great Depression.

I said

What? I don't know if your are serious or not but the Great Depression happened because of a governmentally established agency, i.e. the Federal Reserve who, along with the government generated booms through easy money and credit, inevitably resulting in a bust.

You didn't respond but made another ignorant assertion, which led me to believe that you have no idea of the existence of the Federal Reserve, which led to me posting up some wikipedia articles for your benefit.

Then you go on to say that it was "unregulated capitalism" that caused the Depression without explaining how or why. You then brought up a case in 1893, which I have refuted.

No and no. America isn't not a socialist state.

It would first be prudent for us to define what socialism means.

- Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
-The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.
-A theory or system of social reform which contemplates a complete reconstruction of society, with a more just and equitable distribution of property and labor

Now consider the following
- in America, government spending accounts for 45% of GDP.
- Over the past decade, over 800,000 pages of regulations have been added at the federal level alone.
- Credit is centralised in the hands of the state - plank of communist manifesto
- there is a public education system - communist manifesto plank
- there is a heavily progressive income tax - communist manifesto plank
- centralization of the means of communication and transportation in the hands of the State ie. the FCC - communist manifesto plank)

Consider also this list of US federal Agencies: The department of agriculture, department of commerce, department of defence, department of education, department of energy, department of health and human services, department of homeland security, department of housing and urban development, department of the interior, department of justice, department of labor, department of state, department of transportation, department of the treasury, department of veterans affairs ONTOP OF THE DOZENS of government corporations etc who manage every aspect of the economy. The extents to which these agencies control and regulate every aspect of its citizen's life is astonishing. All major industries are tightly controlled, among of which are mining, logging, agriculture, retail, labour markets, housing, transportation, etc etc etc - representing the backbone of the US economy.

Now consider the price ceilings on gas and electricity, rents for apartments and insurance premiums, or tariffs and quotas imposed upon imports etc

Major corporations get everything and the rich get away with anything in this country. If you have $$$ you're advantaged here, and you can influence interest groups that pressure Congressmen to do what you want.

The existence of corporations is predicated upon government support anyway. Not what us dirty greedy libertarians support.

And Asian countries are a very bad example to cite. China is a environmental disaster,

The environment is also shit Russia as well. Just fyi.

You are ignorant of the fact that the Chinese government is one of the most active environmental enforcers in the world. The bad environment in china is a result of the governments interference in Environmental law. The Chinese state's arrogation of all pollution litigation to its own courts is a clear collectivization of environmental property rights — most notably rights to air and property surfaces, most of which are covered in soot after a few years of operation. The only solution is the extension of property rights to environmental rights as well

India offers extensive social protection and benefits to its huge population, but still has major gaps between the rich and poor.

Why should the gap between the rich and the poor be an issue? I have no idea why economic equality is such an important ideal. You leftist always go on about some egalitarian nonsense without even considering if it even has any ethical justification at all. I'm sure those in afria now wouldn't mind 5% of their population or whatever being insanely rich if that could mean that they would be afforded lives even remotely similar to what people take for granted in the US or Australia.

Bad example for you to use.

Here you are criticizing socialists, yet you turn around and cite socialist countries that want to implement extensive social security protections? What?

You first might want to look up what India did in 1991.
reason.com/archives/2006/06/06/the-rise-and-fall-of-indian-so

I also don't believe in universal healthcare

I brought up the case of China and India to demonstrate what the effects of embracing capitalism are and how these countries are much better off now than they were before.

Certainly more then you might have. And I'm not a communist. That's a cheapshot. I'm also not against capitalism. I'm just in favor of a more regulated form of it, like in Germany and Scandinavia (Sweden in particular).

You cannot regulate capitalism. Socialism/Communism as we all know is violent, unethical and downright idiocy. Thus, any steps one takes towards it is thus corresponding abhorrent. According to Murray Rothbard, the state has a natural tendency to transcend its very limits. I mean, consider the US, the UK, Australia where the limited" government has grown exponentially in size and power over the past 100 years.

This is not entirely telling of what really happened. A lot of what happened in the 1893 crash was associated to the gold standard.

"Because paper currency had to be backed by gold, people did not have much faith in paper currency and traded it in for specie. With gold reserves depleted, banks asked debtors to pay off their loans."

this in no way refutes what I have said.

The depression was also far more global then you may think.

This too.

But that's not my argument. The problem here is I think you're simply refusing to read what I have posted. I never said I was against capitalism. And while I claimed to a socialist (closer to social democrat in the European sense), I'm in favor of a more mixed system. Not all social democrats are against capitalism you know. They just want to use it in their favor. However, I'm also in favor of extensive social protection, including universal health care.

Lol in Australia we have universal healthcare. And guess what? People die in mile long lines waiting for treatment anyway.

No you didn't. You really didn't. You didn't even make an argument. You only chose to engage in personal attacks. Your outline isn't clear at all. And my points stand.

Then you obviously didn't read. I blamed the Depression on the feds who expanded credit thus ultimately resulting in a crash. A more comprehensive argument has been provided to Kulindahr.

More insults. My argument is grounded in Milton Keynes. I doubt you know who he is.

Even one you should have cited Adam Smith, is in favor of certain intervention in the economy.

Sounds like a nobody.