Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism

by Lawrence Reed

  The reason your great-grandfather earned $5 a week for 60 hours of labor must be sought in his low productivity, not in the absence of labor unions. The $5 he earned constituted full and fair payment for his productive efforts—a voluntary contract he likely entered into because it represented his best opportunity. The economic principles of the free market, the competition among employers, a man’s mobility and freedom of choice, assured him full wages under the given production conditions.

  Wages were low and working conditions primitive because labor productivity was low, machines and tools were relatively primitive, technology and production methods were crude when compared with today’s. If, for any reason, our productivity were to sink back to that of our forebears, our wages, too, would decline to their levels and our work week would lengthen again no matter what the activities of labor unions or the decrees of government.

  In a free market economy, labor productivity determines wage rates. As it is the undeniable policy of labor unions to reduce this productivity (as measured per man-hour) by forcing compensation up or spreading out the work with restrictive work rules, they have in fact reduced the wages of the masses of people although some privileged members have benefited temporarily at the expense of others. This is true especially today when the unions enjoy many legal immunities and considerable political powers. And it also was true during the nineteenth century when our ancestors labored from dawn to dusk for low wages.

  Through a variety of coercive measures, labor unions merely impose higher labor costs on employers. The higher costs reduce the returns on capital and curtail production, which curbs the opportunities for employment. This is why our centers of unionism are also our centers of highest unemployment; they are also the industries that have seen the most dramatic declines in numbers of existing jobs, because like anything else, the higher the price, the less will be purchased. (Editor’s Note: It’s also why compulsory unionism states for years have shown lower rates of both employment growth and wage rates than so-called “right-to-work” states.)

  True enough, the senior union members who happen to keep their jobs do enjoy higher wages. But those who can no longer find jobs in unionized industries then seek employment in nonunionized activity. This influx and absorption of excess labor tends to reduce their wages.

  The resulting difference between union and nonunion wages rates gives rise to the notion that labor unions must indeed benefit workers. In reality, the presence of the nonunionized sectors of the labor market hides the disastrous consequences of union policy by preventing mass unemployment. (Editor’s Note: Nonetheless, with 94 percent of today’s private sector workers being completely non-union, and many of them enjoying very high wage rates, it’s increasingly difficult for unions to argue that workers without unions are exploited and unprotected.)

  (Editor’s Note: This essay, with minor updates, was first published in the 1962 book, Clichés of Socialism.)

  SUMMARY

  •Wages can only be paid out of what is produced (no production, no wages), therefore greater productivity is the key to higher wages

  •Unions typically hamper production. Union activity may result in some people getting more but without an increase in productivity, that simply means that some other people must get less. Either you bake a bigger pie for everybody or you just slice the pie up differently

  •It looks sometimes like unions have actually forced wages higher because of the lower wages in non-unionized businesses. But the latter are caused in part by the outflow of labor from unionized sectors to non-unionized ones. Unionized auto-workers today, for example, may make a little more per hour than their nonunionized counterparts but there are a lot fewer of them too!

  #32

  “FDR WAS ELECTED IN 1932 ON A PROGRESSIVE PLATFORM TO PLAN THE ECONOMY”

  BY LAWRENCE W. REED

  HARRY TRUMAN ONCE SAID, “THE ONLY THING NEW IN THE WORLD IS THE HISTORY you don’t know.” That observation applies especially well to what tens of millions of Americans have been taught about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the man under whom Truman served as vice president for about a month.

  Recent scholarship (including a highly acclaimed book, New Deal or Raw Deal, by Young America’s Foundation’s speaker and a FEE senior historian Burton Folsom) is thankfully disabusing Americans of the once-popular myth that FDR saved us from the Great Depression.

  Another example is a 2004 article by two UCLA economists—Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian—in the important mainstream Journal of Political Economy. They observed that Franklin Roosevelt extended the Great Depression by seven long years. “The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery,” the authors show, “but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.”

  In a commentary on Cole and Ohanian’s research (“The New Deal Debunked (again),” available on Mises.org), Loyola University economist Thomas DiLorenzo pointed out that six years after FDR took office, unemployment was almost six times the pre-Depression level. Per capita GDP, personal consumption expenditures, and net private investment were all lower in 1939 than they were in 1929.

  “The fact that it has taken ‘mainstream’ neoclassical economists so long to recognize [that FDR’s policies exacerbated the disaster],” notes DiLorenzo, “is truly astounding,” but still “better late than never.”

  A considerable degree of central planning in Washington is certainly what Franklin Roosevelt delivered, but it was not what he promised when he was first elected in 1932. My own essay on this period, “Great Myths of the Great Depression” found on FEE.org) provides many details, based on the very platform and promises on which FDR ran. But until recently, I was unaware of a long-forgotten book that makes the case as well as any.

  Hell Bent for Election was written by James P. Warburg, a banker who witnessed the 1932 election and the first two years of Roosevelt’s first term from the inside. Warburg, the son of prominent financier and Federal Reserve cofounder Paul Warburg, was no less than a high-level financial adviser to FDR himself. Disillusioned with the President, he left the administration in 1934 and wrote his book a year later.

  Warburg voted for the man who said this on March 2, 1930, as Governor of New York:

  The doctrine of regulation and legislation by “master minds,” in whose judgment and will all the people may gladly and quietly acquiesce, has been too glaringly apparent at Washington during these last ten years. Were it possible to find “master minds” so unselfish, so willing to decide unhesitatingly against their own personal interests or private prejudices, men almost godlike in their ability to hold the scales of justice with an even hand, such a government might be to the interests of the country; but there are none such on our political horizon, and we cannot expect a complete reversal of all the teachings of history.

  What Warburg and the country actually elected in 1932 was a man whose subsequent performance looks little like the platform and promises on which he ran and a lot like those of that year’s Socialist Party candidate, Norman Thomas.

  Who campaigned for a “drastic” reduction of 25 percent in federal spending, a balanced federal budget, a rollback of government intrusion into agriculture, and restoration of a sound gold currency? Roosevelt did. Who called the administration of incumbent Herbert Hoover “the greatest spending administration in peace time in all our history” and assailed it for raising taxes and tariffs? Roosevelt did. FDR’s running mate, John Nance Garner, even declared that Hoover “was leading the country down the road to socialism.”

  It was socialist Norman Thomas, not Franklin Roosevelt, who proposed massive increases in federal spending and deficits and sweeping interventions into the private economy—and he barely mustered 2 percent of the vote. When the dust settled, Warburg shows, we got what Thomas promised, more of what Hoover had been lambasted for, and almost nothing that FDR himself had pledged. FDR employed more “master minds” to plan the economy than perhaps all previous presidents combined.

  After detailing the promises and
the duplicity, Warburg offered this assessment of the man who betrayed him and the country:

  Much as I dislike to say so, it is my honest conviction that Mr. Roosevelt has utterly lost his sense of proportion. He sees himself as the one man who can save the country, as the one man who can “save capitalism from itself,” as the one man who knows what is good for us and what is not. He sees himself as indispensable. And when a man thinks of himself as being indispensable . . . that man is headed for trouble.

  Was FDR an economic wizard? Warburg reveals nothing of the sort, observing that FDR was “undeniably and shockingly superficial about anything that relates to finance.” He was driven not by logic, facts, or humility but by “his emotional desires, predilections, and prejudices.”

  “Mr. Roosevelt,” wrote Warburg, “gives me the impression that he can really believe what he wants to believe, really think what he wants to think, and really remember what he wants to remember, to a greater extent than anyone I have ever known.” Less charitable observers might diagnose the problem as “delusions of grandeur.”

  “I believe that Mr. Roosevelt is so charmed with the fun of brandishing the band leader’s baton at the head of the parade, so pleased with the picture he sees of himself, that he is no longer capable of recognizing that the human power to lead is limited, that the ‘new ideas’ of leadership dished up to him by his bright young men in the Brain Trust are nothing but old ideas that have been tried before, and that one cannot uphold the social order defined in the Constitution and at the same time undermine it,” Warburg lamented.

  So if Warburg was right (and I believe he was), Franklin Delano Roosevelt misled the country with his promises in 1932 and put personal ambition and power lust in charge—not a very uncommon thing as politicians go. In any event, the country got a nice little bait-and-switch deal, and the economy languished as a result.

  In the world of economics and free exchange, the rule is that you get what you pay for. The 1932 election is perhaps the best example of the rule that prevails all too often in the political world: You get what you voted against.

  SUMMARY

  •Franklin Roosevelt delivered a lot of central planning from Washington but that wasn’t what he asked voters to endorse in the 1932 election

  •FDR attacked Hoover for greatly increasing taxes and spending but once elected, did even more of both

  •FDR’s close adviser, James Warburg, thought that FDR was economically illiterate and politically opportunistic

  #33

  “THE GREAT DEPRESSION WAS A CALAMITY OF UNFETTERED CAPITALISM”

  BY LAWRENCE W. REED

  HOW BAD WAS THE GREAT DEPRESSION? OVER THE FOUR YEARS FROM 1929 TO 1933, production at the nation’s factories, mines, and utilities fell by more than half. People’s real disposable incomes dropped 28 percent. Stock prices collapsed to one-tenth of their pre-crash height. The number of unemployed Americans rose from 1.6 million in 1929 to 12.8 million in 1933. One of every four workers was out of a job at the Depression’s nadir, and ugly rumors of revolt simmered for the first time since the Civil War.

  Old myths never die; they just keep showing up in college economics and political science textbooks. Students today are frequently taught that unfettered free enterprise collapsed of its own weight in 1929, paving the way for a decade-long economic depression full of hardship and misery. President Herbert Hoover is presented as an advocate of “hands-off,” or laissez-faire, economic policy, while his successor, Franklin Roosevelt, is the economic savior whose policies brought us recovery. This popular account of the Depression belongs in a book of fairy tales and not in a serious discussion of economic history, as a review of the facts demonstrates.

  To properly understand the events of the time, it is appropriate to view the Great Depression as not one, but four consecutive depressions rolled into one. The late economist Hans F. Sennholz labeled these four “phases” as follows: the business cycle; the disintegration of the world economy; the New Deal; and the Wagner Act. The first phase explains why the crash of 1929 happened in the first place; the other three show how government intervention kept the economy in a stupor for over a decade.

  The Great Depression was not the country’s first depression, though it proved to be the longest. The common thread woven through the several earlier debacles was disastrous manipulation of the money supply by government. For various reasons, government policies were adopted that ballooned the quantity of money and credit. A boom resulted, followed later by a painful day of reckoning. None of America’s depressions prior to 1929, however, lasted more than four years and most of them were over in two. The Great Depression lasted for a dozen years because the government compounded its monetary errors with a series of harmful interventions.

  Most monetary economists, particularly those of the “Austrian school,” have observed the close relationship between money supply and economic activity. When government inflates the money and credit supply, interest rates at first fall. Businesses invest this “easy money” in new production projects and a boom takes place in capital goods. As the boom matures, business costs rise, interest rates readjust upward, and profits are squeezed. The easy-money effects thus wear off and the monetary authorities, fearing price inflation, slow the growth of or even contract the money supply. In either case, the manipulation is enough to knock out the shaky supports from underneath the economic house of cards.

  One of the most thorough and meticulously documented accounts of the Fed’s inflationary actions prior to 1929 is America’s Great Depression by the late Murray Rothbard. Using a broad measure that includes currency, demand and time deposits, and other ingredients, Rothbard estimated that the Federal Reserve expanded the money supply by more than 60 percent from mid-1921 to mid-1929. The flood of easy money drove interest rates down, pushed the stock market to dizzy heights, and gave birth to the “Roaring Twenties.” Some economists miss this because they look at measures of the “price level,” which didn’t change much. But easy money distorts relative prices, which in turn fosters unsustainable conditions in certain sectors.

  By early 1929, the Federal Reserve was taking the punch away from the party. It choked off the money supply, raised interest rates, and for the next three years presided over a money supply that shrank by 30 percent. This deflation following the inflation wrenched the economy from tremendous boom to colossal bust.

  The “smart” money—the Bernard Baruchs and the Joseph Kennedys who watched things like money supply—saw that the party was coming to an end before most other Americans did. Baruch actually began selling stocks and buying bonds and gold as early as 1928; Kennedy did likewise, commenting, “only a fool holds out for the top dollar.”

  When the masses of investors eventually sensed the change in Fed policy, the stampede was underway. The stock market, after nearly two months of moderate decline, plunged on “Black Thursday”—October 24, 1929—as the pessimistic view of large and knowledgeable investors spread.

  The stock market crash was only a symptom—not the cause—of the Great Depression: the market rose and fell in near synchronization with what the Fed was doing. If this crash had been like previous ones, the subsequent hard times might have ended in a year or two. But unprecedented political bungling instead prolonged the misery for twelve long years.

  Unemployment in 1930 averaged a mildly recessionary 8.9 percent, up from 3.2 percent in 1929. It shot up rapidly until peaking out at more than 25 percent in 1933. Until March 1933, these were the years of President Herbert Hoover—the man that anti-capitalists depict as a champion of noninterventionist, laissez-faire economics.

  Did Hoover really subscribe to a “hands off the economy,” free-market philosophy? His opponent in the 1932 election, Franklin Roosevelt, didn’t think so. During the campaign, Roosevelt blasted Hoover for spending and taxing too much, boosting the national debt, choking off trade, and putting millions of people on the dole. He accused the president of “reckless and extravagant” spending, of thin
king “that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible,” and of presiding over “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.” Roosevelt’s running mate, John Nance Garner, charged that Hoover was “leading the country down the path of socialism.” Contrary to the modern myth about Hoover, Roosevelt and Garner were absolutely right.

  The crowning folly of the Hoover administration was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, passed in June 1930. It came on top of the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922, which had already put American agriculture in a tailspin during the preceding decade. The most protectionist legislation in U.S. history, Smoot-Hawley virtually closed the borders to foreign goods and ignited a vicious international trade war.

  Officials in the administration and in Congress believed that raising trade barriers would force Americans to buy more goods made at home, which would solve the nagging unemployment problem. They ignored an important principle of international commerce: trade is ultimately a two-way street; if foreigners cannot sell their goods here, then they cannot earn the dollars they need to buy here.

  Foreign companies and their workers were flattened by Smoot-Hawley’s steep tariff rates, and foreign governments soon retaliated with trade barriers of their own. With their ability to sell in the American market severely hampered, they curtailed their purchases of American goods. American agriculture was particularly hard hit. With a stroke of the presidential pen, farmers in this country lost nearly a third of their markets. Farm prices plummeted and tens of thousands of farmers went bankrupt. With the collapse of agriculture, rural banks failed in record numbers, dragging down hundreds of thousands of their customers.