Myths of the Great Depression

David Friedman snubs David Frum with some basic facts:
Friedman writes: "... David Frum, a former speech writer for George W. Bush and a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, responded by blaming the gold standard for the Great Depression. "Threatened with the exhaustion of its gold supply," Frum said, "the government felt it had no choice: It had to close the budget deficit. So, in the throes of a severe downturn, the U.S. government did exactly the opposite of what economists would otherwise advise: It cut spending and raised taxes — capsizing the economy even deeper into depression."
But as the table below shows, that version of the history of the Great Depression is entirely fictional.
During every year of Hoover's administration, from 1929 to 1932, federal expenditure increased.
By 1932, expenditure had gone up 50% measured in dollars, almost doubled measured in purchasing power, tripled measured as a fraction of national income..." Read full text
Comment: Some myths, so it seems, never die. It is absolutely amazing how anybody can still hold on to the Rooseveltian fairy tale that Hoover's failure was his "do-nothing-policy" when in fact it was the opposite.  Hoover was as much an interventionist when in office as Roosevelt. Both presidents must bear the blame to have pushed the world into the abyss of depression with world war as its consequence.
There is this saying that who doesn't know history is condemned to repeat it. This may well be the case with the current economic and financial crisis. The myth is already in the making that George W. Bush was a president of laissez-faire and it was finally Obama who "got us out of the depression" -- although (just like with Roosevelt), Obama's contribution most probably will be to prolong and deepen the crisis.
Besides Frum, it is also Paul Krugman who is in urgent need to expand his education by reading the Murray Rothbard classic America's Great Depression