Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation
For Immediate Release
Monday, December 12, 2011
202-285-0244
www.freedomandprosperity.org
New CF&P “Economics 101” Video Debunks Depression Myths, Exposes Damaging Impact of Statist Policies by Hoover and FDR
(Washington, D.C., Monday, December 12, 2011) The latest “Economics 101” video released today by the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation (CF&P), narrated by Michelle Fields, explains that most politicians have learned the wrong lessons from the Great Depression. Entitled, “The New Deal Was A Failure: Hoover and FDR Prolonged the Great Depression with Big Government,” the video illuminates, through a timely economic history lesson, the dangers of President Obama’s insistence on following in the footsteps of FDR.
The video debunks two prominent, Depression-era myths: 1) That Hoover was a free market ideologue, and 2) that the New Deal ended the Great Depression. Hoover, in fact, dramatically increased government spending and instituted many programs that FDR expanded into the New Deal, as admitted by a prominent member of Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust.” These programs, however, had the unfortunate effect of preventing a recovery and, according to two scholars, extending the Depression for an additional seven years.
The mini-documentary provides lessons for current policymakers. President Obama should pay particular attention, for instance, where it explains how Keynesian economists wrongly predicted that the economy would collapse after WWII, when government spending shrank. In fact, the economy rebounded precisely because politicians got out of the way and allowed markets to work.
Links to the video: YouTube | Dailymotion | Blip.TV
“As George Santayana famously said,” noted CF&P Foundation President Andrew Quinlan, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Quinlan added, “Most lawmakers today are in desperate need of a lesson in economic history, but none more so than President Obama, whose free-spending, heavy-handed interventions are dangerously close to ushering in a new depression.”
“Like Bush and Obama today, both Hoover and Roosevelt were big spenders,” added Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute. “The single most important lesson of this video, “ he concluded, “is that intervention didn’t work during the Great Depression, and it doesn’t work today.”
Executive Summary
This mini-documentary from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation explains how the statist policies of Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt lengthened and deepened the Great Depression. The video also briefly explains how reductions in the burden of government spending helped the economy recover from a deep recession after World War I and to grow after World War II.
This new video is part of CF&P’s Economics 101 video series, which is designed to explain free market concepts, with particular emphasis on reaching students and young people. This is the sixteenth video in the series.
The other Econ 101 videos: The European Fiscal Crisis and Lessons for America, Free Markets, Not Redistribution, Is Best Way to Reduce Poverty, Seven Reasons Why Tax Increases Are the Wrong Approach; Tax Competition: A Powerful Force to Restrain Big Government; Four Reasons Why Big Government Is Bad Government; Keynesian Economics Is Wrong: Economic Growth Causes Consumer Spending, Not the Other Way Around; Indexing the Capital Gains Tax to Protect Taxpayers from Inflation; Repealing Obamacare and Restoring a Free Market in Healthcare; The Job-Killing Impact of Minimum Wage Laws; Deficits, Debts and Unfunded Liabilities; Cost of the Internal Revenue Code; Lessons Learned From Sweden; Government Monopolies; Moral Hazard; and Don’t Copy Europe’s Mistakes.
Web Page for Economics 101 Videos:
http://freedomandprosperity.org/videos/economics-101-series/
CF&P Foundation has also released more than four-dozen mini-documentaries since 2007. These videos include Tax Competition Primer, VAT-Hidden Tax, Global Flat Tax Revolution, Cutting the U.S. Corporate Income Tax, Promoting Prosperity, Obama’s So-Called Stimulus, Obama’s Deferral Proposal, Case Against Class-Warfare Tax Policy, President Obama’s Dishonest Demagoguery on Tax Havens, Six Reasons Why the Capital Gains Tax Should Be Abolished, a three part series on the Benefits of Tax Havens and another three-part series on the Laffer Curve.
Link: http://freedomandprosperity.org/videos/economic-lessons-series/
Web Links:
Youtube
http://youtu.be/xWAgt_YCNuw
For additional comments:
Andrew Quinlan can be reached at 202-285-0244, andy@freedomandprosperity.org
Dan Mitchell can be reached at 202-218-4615, dmitchell@cato.org
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