Eighty years after the Great Depression began, the literature on this painful episode of American history is undergoing an encouraging metamorphosis. The conventional assessment that so dominated historical writings for decades argued that free markets caused the debacle and that FDR's New Deal saved the country. Surely, there are plenty of poorly informed partisans, ideologues and quacks that still make these superficial claims. Serious historians and economists, however, have been busy chipping away at the falsehoods. The essay you have just read cites many recent works worth careful reading in their entirety.
At the very moment this latest edition of "Great Myths of the Great Depression" was about to go to press, Simon & Schuster published a splendid new volume I strongly recommend. Authored by the Foundation for Economic Education's senior historian and Hillsdale College professor, Dr. Burton W. Folsom, the book is provocatively titled "New Deal or Raw Deal? — How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America." It's one of the most illuminating works on the subject. It will help mightily to correct the record and educate our fellow citizens about what really happened in the 1930s.
Another great addition to the literature, appearing in 2007, is "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" by Amity Shlaes. The fact that it has been a New York Times bestseller suggests there is a real hunger for the truth about this period of history.
While Americans may be unlearning some of what they thought they knew about the Great Depression, that's not the same as saying we have learned the important lessons well enough to avoid making the same mistakes again. Indeed, today we are no closer to fixing the primary cause of the business cycle — monetary mischief — than we were 80 years ago.
The financial crisis that gripped America in 2008 ought to be a wake-up call. The fingerprints of government meddling are all over it. From 2001 to 2005, the Federal Reserve revved up the money supply, expanding it at a feverish double-digit rate. The dollar plunged in overseas markets and commodity prices soared. With the banks flush with liquidity from the Fed, interest rates plummeted and risky loans to borrowers of dubious merit ballooned. Politicians threw more fuel on the fire by jawboning banks to lend hundreds of billions of dollars for subprime mortgages.
When the bubble burst, some of the very culprits who promoted the policies that caused it postured as our rescuers while endorsing new interventions, bigger government, more inflation of money and credit and massive taxpayer bailouts of failing firms. Many of them are also calling for higher taxes and tariffs, the very nonsense that took a recession in 1930 and made it a long and deep depression.
The taxpayer bailouts of agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as a growing number of private firms in the early fall of 2008, represent more folly with a monumental price tag. Not only will we and future generations be paying those bills for decades, the very process of throwing good money after bad will pile moral hazard on top of moral hazard, fostering more bad decisions and future bailouts. This is the stuff that undermines both free enterprise and the soundness of the currency. Much more inflation to pay these bills is more than a little likely, sooner or later.
"Government," observed the renowned Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, "is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper, and make it worthless by applying ink." Mises was describing the curse of inflation, the process whereby government expands a nation's money supply and thereby erodes the value of each monetary unit — dollar, peso, pound, franc or whatever. It often shows up in the form of rising prices, which most people confuse with the inflation itself. The distinction is an important one because, as economist Percy Greaves explained so eloquently, "Changing the definition changes the responsibility."
Define inflation as rising prices and, like the clueless Jimmy Carter of the 1970s, you'll think that oil sheiks, credit cards and private businesses are the culprits, and price controls are the answer. Define inflation in the classic fashion as an increase in the supply of money and credit, with rising prices as a consequence, and you then have to ask the revealing question, "Who increases the money supply?" Only one entity can do that legally; all others are called "counterfeiters" and go to jail.
Nobel laureate Milton Friedman argued indisputably that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary matter. Rising prices no more cause inflation than wet streets cause rain.
Before paper money, governments inflated by diminishing the precious-metal content of their coinage. The ancient prophet Isaiah reprimanded the Israelites with these words: "Thy silver has become dross, thy wine mixed with water." Roman emperors repeatedly melted down the silver denarius and added junk metals until the denarius was less than one percent silver. The Saracens of Spain clipped the edges of their coins so they could mint more until the coins became too small to circulate. Prices rose as a mirror image of the currency's worth.
Rising prices are not the only consequence of monetary and credit expansion. Inflation also erodes savings and encourages debt. It undermines confidence and deters investment. It destabilizes the economy by fostering booms and busts. If it's bad enough, it can even wipe out the very government responsible for it in the first place and then lead to even worse afflictions. Hitler and Napoleon both rose to power in part because of the chaos of runaway inflations.
All this raises many issues economists have long debated: Who or what should determine a nation's supply of money? Why do governments so regularly mismanage it? What is the connection between fiscal and monetary policy? Suffice it to say here that governments inflate because their appetite for revenue exceeds their willingness to tax or their ability to borrow. British economist John Maynard Keynes was an influential charlatan in many ways, but he nailed it when he wrote, "By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens."
So, you say, inflation is nasty business but it's just an isolated phenomenon with the worst cases confined to obscure nooks and crannies like Zimbabwe. Not so. The late Frederick Leith-Ross, a famous authority on international finance, observed: "Inflation is like sin; every government denounces it and every government practices it." Even Americans have witnessed hyperinflations that destroyed two currencies — the ill-fated continental dollar of the Revolutionary War and the doomed Confederate money of the Civil War.
Today's slow-motion dollar depreciation, with consumer prices rising at persistent but mere single-digit rates, is just a limited version of the same process. Government spends, runs deficits and pays some of its bills through the inflation tax. How long it can go on is a matter of speculation, but trillions in national debt and politicians who make misers of drunken sailors and get elected by promising even more are not factors that should encourage us.
Inflation is very much with us but it must end someday. A currency's value is not bottomless. Its erosion must cease either because government stops its reckless printing or prints until it wrecks the money. But surely, which way it concludes will depend in large measure on whether its victims come to understand what it is and where it comes from. Meanwhile, our economy looks like a roller coaster because Congresses, Presidents and the agencies they've empowered never cease their monetary mischief.
Are you tired of politicians blaming each other, scrambling to cover their behinds and score political points in the midst of a crisis, and piling debts upon debts they audaciously label "stimulus packages"? Why do so many Americans want to trust them with their health care, education, retirement and a host of other aspects of their lives? It's madness writ large. The antidote is the truth. We must learn the lessons of our follies and resolve to fix them now, not later.
To that end, I invite the reader to join the education process. Support organizations like FEE and the Mackinac Center that are working to inform citizens about the proper role of government and how a free economy operates. Help distribute copies of this essay and other good publications that promote liberty and free enterprise. Demand that your representatives in government balance the budget, conform to the spirit and letter of the Constitution and stop trying to buy your vote with other people's money.
Everyone has heard the sage observation of philosopher George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." It's a warning we should not fail to heed.
