The Great Depression

           Many say the Great Depression was fixed by the government’s intervention, but I disagree.  The government and presidents during the great depression just made things worse and continued our economy on a path that took a great deal to fix.  One example that we learned in class is how the private industry’s building of railroads did better then when the government built railroads.  The government intervening actually hurt free market economy and almost took it out of existence.

I think the FED had the biggest part in hurting our free market economy.  It was to involved in running our economy financially and created problems that eventually led to the stock market crash.  If the government would have just concentrated on fixing our nations debt after world war one and two instead of trying to intervene in our economy we would have been better off. 

Hoover and Roosevelt both hurt our economy with their high taxes, tariffs, and their implementing high wages and minimum wage.  Hoover made wages higher, which led to higher unemployment.  Hoover also created the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which started a trade war among other countries.  This hurt our economy because now we were not trading as much with other countries.  Lastly Hoover increased taxes and the top bracket got the worst of the taxing.  This made it so business owners had dis-incentive to grow there companies and create more jobs.  It was just not Hoover hurting our economy though; Roosevelt also had a part in it also.  Roosevelt actually increased taxes more than Hoover had.  He also created many New Deal Programs.  Some which may have helped a little, but others were disastrous.  Some of the job programs he created were dangerous, but he did nothing to stop it or help it.  One great example of this is when he sent the bonus army down to Florida to build bridges and such and he was told it was hurricane season and to take the men out but left the bonus army there and over 200 men were killed.  Roosevelt also took away some private contracts and gave them to the government: one example of this is the delivering of Air Mail.  Roosevelt also tried to stop competition and raise wages thinking this would end the depression.  The things these two men did in all reality hurt our economy more than them just sitting back and letting our free market economy fix itself.

The government was just to involved in our economy during the Great Depression and in my opinion actually made the recovery worse.  If the government would have just concentrated on the debt problems and other things they really needed to do and left the free market to fix itself the economy would have been better off.