Did the New Deal make the Great Depression last longer?

[davidlosh@davidlosh.com]

This may be a red herring but, it's interesting to me that the New Deal started at the same time Prohibition ended. Could Prohibition have been like our current "War on Drugs?" Prohibition certainly must have been a huge deployment of man power. There must have also been a Black Market economy to go along with that. All in all I'm sure Prohibition kept a lot of the work force busy. When that ended a lot of people lost jobs.

Let's return to Vietnam. All we could ever hope for in Vietnam was to hold out long enough to make a peace.

That peace never came and we call that a loss. We are however well liked in South, and in many cases North Vietnam. We attempted to hold off the Chinese, and you are very correct the Chinese are hated in Vietnam. Any occupier is hated by the occupied. The Chinese are now the occupiers of Vietnam and we are a fading memory of what could have been.

As far as Iraq, there are tribal factions who have no allegiance to a central power. The idea that Saddam Hussein was in power is only in the minds of Americans. Only Allah has the power in Iraq. it is his will that the people follow. There are no weapons that can fight that ideology. So if you are talking about winning there it will only be by submitting to the will of Allah and that may prove difficult.

Winning or losing makes no difference however to the fact war is good for economic growth.

The New Deal was a redirection of a war effort. No matter how you look at it World War One was never finished. We kicked the Kaiser back to Germany, but it was the failings of the monarchies that were the underlying cause of the war. We even welcomed the grass roots rise of Hitler as an opposing force by the people.

As long as the Czar of Russia was in power war was inevitable. Our participation, to protect our interests, was set in stone.

How any of this relates to today's stimulus package was best summed up at today's G7 meeting. Protectionism has no place in today's economy. If one country fails we all fail. I am paraphrasing. A New Deal today would have to be global in concept. It's a new type of World War.

A quote i like from the Vietnam era by an economist was "in the future wars will be fought economically."

[sniglet]

The war in Vietnam was similar, I think, to the Boer war. Just a side-show, in preparation for the bigger operation in the years ahead.

I believe the best analogy in history I can think of right now is 1930. People know things are getting bad, but it hasn't really hit home yet. Remember that just as the depression was drawing to a close we wound up in WWII in 1941. That really makes me stop and think considering how my 4 year old son will be a teen-ager 10 years from now. I have no idea what terrible war will arise that calls out for the blood of the nation's youth, but I think that the odds of such an event is non-trivial.

The New Deal arose at the bottom of a great generational economic downturn, and it is significant that it was enacted <i>after</i> the economy had reached a bottom in 1932.

Socialisim waxes and wanes with the mood of society. When every is feeling happy and "bullish", socialism becomes marginalized. When everone is bearish, socialism reigns supreme.

[davidlosh@davidlosh.com]

The Boer Wars were a fight for territorial control by colonists.

That is the whole point here that I would like to make. Our economies have centered around war since the beginning of time. Governments pump in money for weapons, troop deployment, bases, air craft, the navy, technology, and biological research.

In the end what do we get?

There are no more colonies. Every inch of dirt on the planet has been conquered. The New Deal of the 1930s was a protectionist disaster.

Global cooperation is the only thing that we can do from now on. In my opinion the stimulus package will give the United States something to do while we address the larger international issues that need to be dealt with.

If anything was naive it was John McCain insisting he could win a war anywhere. The only way to win is to feed the people of that country and have them like us for the generousity. For the same amount of money we spend on killing people or threatening to kill people we can win minds and bodies.

[rose-colored-coolaid]

[Charles Dean]

[davidlosh@davidlosh.com]

There has always been drought, famine, and locusts. If every one could just stay in one place and till the soil that would be one thing. Things change.

If you have crops they need to be stored, distributed, and protected. You can grow a certain type of crop, but it's hard to rotate all crops in one geographic loacation. Trade was the first economic force and I think kind of trumps agriculture.

All in all there was a point where the masons need to make stronger fortresses, because there were elements in the world that took the crops rather than grow them. Finanlly if you are saying that the industrial revolution changed our agri society into a manufacturing based economy, then the New Deal was for you.

War is a constant. Out of need or greed people just kill each other. It's a sad commentary, but it has to change.

This thread was about the New Deal. It was a period of waiting for war. It was a redirection of a work force in a protectionist, nationalistic endevour that was disasterous economically.

If there is a comparison between the New Deal and today's Stimulus Package it should be that today we work for the global economy. We are all in this together. There is no more hiding behind your own borders.

I mentioned earlier that there is no winning a ground war with China. China has never been conquered. It's because of thier numbers. There are 1.3 billion people in China. If they chose to they could march across Europe. There is nothing that could be done about it. Speculation is that they wouldn't even need to be armed.

For that matter 1 million illegal immigrants cross our border from Mexico every year. If they ever organized, met at one place at one time, they could lock arms and march into the United States.

The stimulus package had better have something for the problems we have globally today. My hope is that Obama starts talking about getting the auto industry out of the gas combustion engine business. Oil and coal are old, dead technologies that we need to get rid of. Nuclear didn't work, but there are millions of technological advances that come out every day that can change things for the better.

Those four million jobs Obama wants to create need to have a positive global impact. That's the New Deal.

[rose-colored-coolaid]

[davidlosh@davidlosh.com]

And they call me delusional.

The point is that the New Deal was a holding pattern for the next war. Governments like war. There was a surrender in World War I and the need to finish a job.

Today is a different concern. There are no more wars to be fought.

Government, our government, uses the war term a lot: the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on terror, and the war on crime, it's a mobilization of man power, jobs.

The one concern today is feeding the world population. There are no amount of weapons that can contain six billion hungry people. We are at a point of global population saturation. There are no more New Worlds to conquer.

So, no New Deal this time around.

[rose-colored-coolaid]

Wait, your argument was that FDR anticipated the rise of Nazism 4 years before he started, and then launched the New Deal as a strategy to keep things together just a little bit until it started?

That makes no sense! Why did we wait until 1942 to enter the war if we were so eager for it to save us?

[davidlosh@davidlosh.com]

Rampant protectionist nationalism. The people of the United States wanted to avoid going back to war. Congress made speeches about leaving Europe to the Europeans.

FDR did absolutely nothing but throw money around on make work projects. There was nothing to win, no goal, no end result.

Yes, politicians knew we were headed back to Europe. Hitler was probably not the best choice for democratic reform of the monarchies, but he would do. He railed against communism. Hitler, like capitalists, thought there was a survival of the fittest.

In my opinion we encouraged Hitler. Communism bad, capitalism good, democracy good, and Germany was acting in a democratic fashion. Hitler was elected by a small margin, but elected none the less.

We are also forgetting that the Great Depression was global. It impacted Europe and helped to give rise to Hitler. Hitler was hope.

I also like the term "to save us." Save us from what? The Great Depression? Why would FDR care? He was buying votes by throwing money at make work projects. The war saved him from being a bigger buffoon than he actually was.

FDR did nothing. He refused to engage what was surely a dangerous enemy, he gave no direction to the country, he allowed starvation while building monuments. He was kind of like our last Emperor.