America's Great Depression [antikvár]

Introduction to the Third Edition America is now in the midst of a full-scale inflationary depression. The inflationary recession of 1969-71 has been quickly succeeded by a far more inflationary depression which began around November 1973, and skidded into a serious depression around the fall of 1974. Since that time, physical production has declined steadily and substantially, and the unemployment rate has risen to around 10 per cent, and even higher in key industrial areas. The desperate attempt by the politico-economic Establishment to place an optimistic gloss on the most severe depression since the 1930's centers on two arguments: (a) the inadequacy of the unemployment statistics, and (b) the fact that things were much worse in the post-1929 depression. The first argument is true but irrelevant; no matter how faulty the statistics, the rapid and severe rise in the unemployment rate from under 6 per cent to 10 per cent in the space of just one year (from 1974 to 1975) tells its own grisly tale. It is true that the economy was in worse shape in the 1930's, but that was the gravest depression in American history; we are now in a depression that is certainly not mild by any pre-1929 standards. The current inflationary depression has revealed starkly to the nation's economists that their cherished theories—adopted and applied since the 1930's—are tragically and fundamentally incorrect. For forty years we have been told, in the textbooks, the economic journals, and the pronouncements of our government's economic advisors, that the government has the tools with which it can easily abolish inflation or recession. We have been told that by juggling fiscal and monetary policy, the government can "fine-tune" the economy to abolish the business cycle and insure permanent prosperity without inflation. Essentially—and stripped of the jargon, the equations, and the graphs—the economic Establishment held all during this period that if the economy is seen to be sliding