Joe from Butler questions my assertion that FDR's policies prolonged the Depression. Citing statistics, Joe accuses me of being part of "recent right wing historical revisionism designed to discredit FDR's economic policies." I will not delve into the minutiae of FDR's individual policies because no matter what empirical evidence I might present, acolytes of FDR will produce a counterexample. In understanding the Great Depression, identification of basic principles is necessary. (However, I do not expect that those that believe government is the solution to all problems and that each citizen is his brother's keeper will ever be swayed.)

A government of a free nation can have no role other than the courts, military, and police. Therefore, any intervention in the market, by definition, involves the violation of someone's rights, is a usurpation of power, and creates a distortion. FDR and many others failed to recognize the Depression's cause, i.e. government manipulation of interest rates and tariffs; consequently, FDR's prescriptions, by being more of the same, were an incorrect way out of the Depression. Mislabeling a mixed economy as a free economy and casting blame on the remaining free aspects of the economy, FDR increased government spending, fixed prices and wages, ceded political power to labor unions, and destroyed the gold standard. Ideally, FDR should have removed the power of the Federal Reserve to manipulate the money supply, removed tariffs, and removed barriers to business expansion. The end result would have abated the Depression sooner. It is unfortunate that the US has not fully recovered from the Depression mentality, for the first thing proposed when an economic downturn occurs, as is occurring now, is more government control of the economy.

Lastly, Joe's assertion that "no serious historian believes that FDR's economic policies prolonged the Great Depression," has nothing to do with the veracity of the subject, is an overt logical fallacy--argumentum ad verecundium, the appeal to authority--and should be dismissed out of hand.

Also, for the record, I have a degree in Industrial Management from Carnegie Mellon University and serve as an adviser to students at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business.