Entenda a Grande Depressão

The Hoover-Roosevelt Depression Revisited

Mises Daily: Tuesday, May 07, 2013 by John P. Cochran

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression. In that work, Rothbard masterfully achieves three objectives.
1. He provides a restatement and extension of the Austrian theory of the business cycle (ABCT) while expertly defending the theory against critics;
2. He applies the theory to the inflationary boom of the 1920s and subsequent bust of 1929-30; and
3. He applies microeconomics, with special attention to what economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway[1] have called the “von Misesian-classical position on labor markets,” to show how government interventions turned what would have otherwise been a bust followed by a brief “garden variety recession,” into a prolonged depression.
Rothbard’s analysis ends with 1933, as the destructive interventions passed from the Hoover New (raw) Deal to the better-known Roosevelt New Deal. A complete Austrian analysis of the Great Depression would include an analysis of all the policy errors and regime uncertainties created by both administrations. This truly was, properly understood, “The Hoover-Roosevelt Depression.”
And, as argued by Robert Higgs (“Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed after the War”) and Vedder and Gallaway (“The Great Depression of 1946”), this Depression ended not with the beginning of World War II[2], but in the post-war recovery which occurred to the surprise of the Keynesian economists who were predicting a return to depression-like conditions. This return to prosperity occurred despite large declines in government spending and a large influx of surviving military personnel into the labor markets (see Arnold Kling’s “The Austerity of 1946” and Robert Higgs’s “The Myth of Pent-up Demand and the Successful Reconversion after World War II”).
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