The Great Recession Of 1920-21 And What It Can Teach Us Today

Thomas Woods, author of the highly-recommended Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, has both a scholarly article and a video out discussing the Harding Administration’s response to the economic downturn of 1920, which by some measures was even more severe than the Great Depression of the 1930s and what it can teach us today.

From the article:







Woods discusses the article in this video, which is nearly an hour long, but well worth watching:

The contrast with 1920-21, of course, is the twin responses of the Hoover and Roosevelt Administrations to the deteriorating economic conditions after 1929. In both cases, their policies did nothing to solve the underlying economic problems they supposedly intended to deal with and instead made the situation much, much worse. There’s a lesson there, if we’re willing to learn it.
