From The Independent Institute
"The Great Escape from the Great Depression" by Robert Higgs

Questions about the Great Depression may be usefully framed as pertaining to three distinct issues: the Great Contraction, the extraordinarily severe economic decline from 1929 to 1933; the Great Duration, the persistence of sub par economic performance for more than a decade; and the Great Escape, the ultimate recovery from this uniquely deep and long depression. Although economists continue to debate the causes of the Great Contraction and the Great Duration, a rough consensus has emerged that major policy blunders of various sorts deserve most of the blame for these calamities. With regard to the Great Escape, economists have also reached substantial agreement, but unfortunately they have come to agree on an interpretation that is almost completely wrong.

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From AntiWar.Com
"The American Empire, RIP" by Justin Raimondo

...Huntington denies that military spending is a drain on the economy, and blames 'consumerism, not militarism,' for America's status as the world's number one debtor. Yet how does he imagine we financed the biggest military build-up in world history? How did we manage to bloat our military budget until it grew larger than the defense expenditures of all the rest of the world combined?

We rang it up on our national credit card. We built an empire on a mountain of debt, and now it's all come tumbling down. Yet it's more than an economic debacle: the Greenspan Bubble was made possible by a certain kind of psychology, a cultural ethos that gave little thought to the long-term consequences of US monetary and military policy, and lived only in the here-and-now. The Bubble pumped up not just the stock market, but also our pretensions, our hubris, our sense of entitlement -- not only to big overpriced homes and a dozen different credit cards, but also to our global preeminence as world policeman. If pride really does cometh before a fall, then one can only observe that we had plenty of warning.

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From LewRockwell.Com
"Blame the government" by Murray Sabrin

As Rothbard documents in his 1963 study, the financial bubble of the 1920s was caused by the Federal Reserve's easy money policy that pumped up real estate and stock market prices. When the bubble burst in 1929, Hoover did all he could to prop up prices in the name of stability and recovery.

All his efforts failed.

The economy continued to spiral downward. Hoover's legacy was sealed.

However, court historians and mainstream economists have been blaming Hoover's 'inaction' for nearly eight decades instead of his big government policies that turned a much needed correction into a full-scale panic and massive depression.

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