America’s Great Depression
by Murray Rothbard
The typical history lesson on the Great Depression goes as follows. The stock market crashed in 1929 due to the greed and excesses of capitalism. Republican Herbert Hoover maintained strict adherence to laissez-faire and it is only with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt that the government came to the rescue. In America’s Great Depression, economist Murray Rothbard shows how all of this is false. Rothbard shows how the Federal Reserve’s inflation during the 1920’s created the bubble that burst in 1929 and how Hoover, far from being a free marketeer, energetically enlisted government actions in an attempt to arrest the progress of the Depression. Rothbard’s conclusion is that the government, via the Federal Reserve, instigated the Depression and then exacerbated it by interfering with the needed economic correction. This is a history – and economic – lesson that you won’t learn in school, but that needs to be heard.
Praise for America’s Great Depression
“Rothbard is to be credited for keeping alive the key ideas about how the market process goes right if left on its own and how it goes so wrong when the central bank induces more growth than savers are willing to finance. – Roger W. Garrison, The Freeman
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