>>Ever heard of the Great Depression?
The Great Depression was “great” because of government intervention in the economy, not despite it.
Few Americans had stock investments in 1929. The market had many similar panics before (e.g. in 1920-21), most of which did not translate into long-term economic collapse.
In the post-WW I bust, Harding did not intervene and allowed deflation to realign the economy to a post-war equilibrium. The result was a short, sharp recession that is seldom discussed in economic literature, mainly because it does not help tyrants make the case for more power.
Hoover was a technocrat, and believed that he could engineer the economy much as he engineered food aid to Europe. His programs were expanded by FDR to become an elaborate system of price controls (NRA) and destruction of millions of bushels of grain and a similar scale of livestock (AAA) in the name of restoring pre-bust prices.
Although the SCOTUS later overturned the NRA, the FDR administration continued its program of direct intervention in the economy. The executive branch, under the aegis of “emergency”, stole the power to make law from Congress, and began promulgating thousands of regulations.
One regulation in particular hastened bank failures: the Treasury forbade banks from crossing state lines in ownership. This made banks unable to manage risk across geographies, destabilizing the banking system and ultimately the economy.
The Great Depression is a fine example of how our criminal class of rulers destroys wealth while blaming their handiwork on “market failure”. And yet you trust them when they tell you that it’s in your interest to bail out AIG, Fannie/Freddie, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley? LOL.
“The Great Depression was “great” because of government intervention in the economy, not despite it.”
That’s hardly accurate. The Great Depression occurred because of the collapse of the credit portion of the money supply. A full one third of the American money supply vanished over the three years 1930-33.
This collapse happened because at that time there was no FDIC and when a bank failed its depositors were wiped out and their savings simply vanished. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz wrote that the single greatest improvement to come out if the Depression was the creation of FDIC, you can find this in their Monetary History of the United States.