Ogg, you only made one point I feel like wasting time explaing the fallacy of.
You decried 'gubmint regyoolayshuns' but seem to ignore the fact that refulqtions placed on banks and wall street after the market crash of 1929 prevented another major market crisis for over 50 years. The ronny raygun cqme in with his 'gubmint isn't tge solution, gubmint is tge problem 'and begsn a republiscum jyhad against regulations.
We went strqit to the S&L crisis meant the rich stole tens if bikliobs ofbdolars, and taxpayers were forced to replace it, so they robbed the country as a whole thanks to raygun brand deregulation.
Further deregulation lead to the recession of the 90s and again more wealth shifted upwards. Then we had tge real estate bubble, the big recession of the 2010s that lead to tge 'new economy' which crushed what was left if the old middle class, and so on.
So much for your 'gugmint regyoolayshuns bad! ' line.
And again, the USN has ran a nuclear energy program that is safe, efficient and effective for 70 years thank to regulations.
Case closed.
That's almost entirely garbage.
The regulations placed on banks during the Great Depression didn't lead to 50 years without a crash. The government response to the crash of 1929 prolonged the depression, which only ended about 15 years later with WW2. Compare Black Thursday in 1929 to the even more severe crash in 1920, where Harding did nothing, and the economy bounced back within a year. And it was the Bretton Woods system and the gold standard established after that war that led to a lack of serious crashes between WW2 and the 1970s. But when Nixon took the US off the gold standard in 1971 and started printing money, it led directly to stagflation. So even if we assume government regulation is responsible for any stability during the 50 year window you gave, instead of attributing it to the real cause which was not inflating the money supply, you still have to carve out 15 years on the front end, and 10 on the back end. 25/50 years is a terrible track record. The monetary inflation starting in the 1970s is also the primary cause of the flattening of real wage growth for the middle class, because monetary inflation is another form of wealth transfer.
And as I explained earlier, Carter deregulated more than Reagan, and the S&L crisis was caused by government regulation, not your bogeyman of greedy corporations. Plus, there was no recession in the 90s. It was an area of almost uniform growth. And you missed the dot com crash of the early aughts.
Also, your idea that Republicans are against regulation is disproved by the number of pages added to the Federal Register each year. The difference between the parties isn't the difference between going 99.99999% the speed of light, and a full stop. It's between 0.9999999c and 0.9999998c.
So government regulation and government interference was behind almost all the economic problems of the last century, and that even includes the housing crash of 2008, which was caused by the Clinton-era repeal of parts of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, as well as government housing policies that pushed lenders to extend credit to people who were incapable of paying it back, because expanding home ownership is political gold, even when it leads to disaster.
I feel like I’m learning a fair bit from this. That said, be prepared for some ignorant questions now that the mental gears are turning.
Was Keynes right about WW2 ending the Depression? I kinda liked Hayek’s take on war and army employment within the rap battle, though I acknowledge it seemed to favor an Austrian perspective. Hoover seemed to me a lot less interventionist than FDR, working to let private and local folks lead, and I heard the fed didn’t slash interest rates by too much during the start of the Depression, but shouldn’t dropping them at all have done something to cause an artificial boom under the Austrian perspective? Basically, why didn’t the Depression end or at least abate with Hoover taking point?
Also, with the raw Austrian perspective, how were there any crashes at all on the gold standard? How could the fed print money or cause inflation when all the money was backed by real gold value?
Regarding flattening middle class wages, is it because inflation started making it harder for the middle class to save and invest to gain money that way and meant wages had to constantly jog to catch up with inflation? Why didn’t the market for labor factor in inflation? Is there a weird mechanism I’m missing?
Wasn’t the dot com crash fueled by excessive speculation? Under Hayek I assume that means it was preceded by low interest rates. But why would the malinvestments from that all be in one sector?
Didn’t know Republicans almost never manage to cut regulations, that lowers my opinion of the right in delivering on campaign promises.
I knew a bit about the poor and dishonest oversight in the ratings system and deregulation that led to 2008. Feel like we need better regulation, albeit less.
Felt like Hayek won the Econ rap battle, perhaps partly due to being favored by the writers. But some of this is making me question that, albeit possibly that’d be less the case if I’d already read his theory and could apply more than rap battle soundbites. The fact that econometricians seemed in favor of Keynes in that rap battle though, in combination with some of this stuff, is making me confused as to whether it’s all as simple as the rap battle Austrian perspective was portrayed. I feel like theories need to bear themselves out in practice, no matter how solid, to be accepted as the whole truth, and econometric statistical analysis may be part of that.