Did you catch that? Sowell said thatThis will make you think, which is a good thing (RTWT). It has major, major implications for what's happening right now.
(a) the market recovered from the crash of '29 just fine, This is highly believable based on the quick recovery from the depression of 1920, and Harding's complete lack of governmnet response.
(b) that government action was the (whole? primary?) cause of the great depression, (c) that the primary legislation responsible for the start of the great depression was a set of import tariffs...which cost the country hundreds of thousands or millions of jobs -- because that's what tariffs do.
For extra credit, analyze the Euro crisis using this framework.
Well, yes. The Great Depression would not have been so great without constant, continual, inept meddling by both the Hoover and FDR administrations. Government cannot know more than the tens of millions of participants in economic decision on a daily basis. And since there is no penalty, no feedback, to the meddlers, it can only get worse. The Euro zone is failing, as predicted by the Austrian School of economics, because the various member nations are run on different time preferences (pleasure now or future pleasure: spending or savings/investment). Remember the ant and the grasshopper, and imagine if the ant is forced to fund the grasshopper as in the long-circulating politically-correct version of the old fable. The grasshopper is Greece, etc. Another old saying also is illustrative: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
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