New CF&P “Economics 101” Video Debunks Depression Myths, Exposes Damaging Impact of Statist Policies by Hoover and FDR

For Immediate Release

Monday, December 12, 2011

202-285-0244

www.freedomandprosperity.org

New CF&P “Economics 101” Video Debunks Depression Myths, Exposes Damaging Impact of Statist Policies by Hoover and FDR

(Washington, D.C., Monday, December 12, 2011) The latest “Economics 101” video released today by theCenter for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation (CF&P), narrated by Michelle Fields, explains that most politicians have learned the wrong lessons from the Great Depression. Entitled, “The New Deal Was A Failure: Hoover and FDR Prolonged the Great Depression with Big Government,” the video illuminates, through a timely economic history lesson, the dangers of President Obama’s insistence on following in the footsteps of FDR.

The video debunks two prominent, Depression-era myths: 1) That Hoover was a free market ideologue, and 2) that the New Deal ended the Great Depression. Hoover, in fact, dramatically increased government spending and instituted many programs that FDR expanded into the New Deal, as admitted by a prominent member of Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust.” These programs, however, had the unfortunate effect of preventing a recovery and, according to two scholars, extending the Depression for an additional seven years.

The mini-documentary provides lessons for current policymakers. President Obama should pay particular attention, for instance, where it explains how Keynesian economists wrongly predicted that the economy would collapse after WWII, when government spending shrank. In fact, the economy rebounded precisely because politicians got out of the way and allowed markets to work.

“As George Santayana famously said,” noted CF&P Foundation President Andrew Quinlan, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Quinlan added, “Most lawmakers today are in desperate need of a lesson in economic history, but none more so than President Obama, whose free-spending, heavy-handed interventions are dangerously close to ushering in a new depression.”

“Like Bush and Obama today, both Hoover and Roosevelt were big spenders,” added Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute. “The single most important lesson of this video, “ he concluded, “is that intervention didn’t work during the Great Depression, and it doesn’t work today.”

Executive Summary

This mini-documentary from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation explains how the statist policies of Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt lengthened and deepened the Great Depression. The video also briefly explains how reductions in the burden of government spending helped the economy recover from a deep recession after World War I and to grow after World War II.

This new video is part of CF&P’s Economics 101 video series, which is designed to explain free market concepts, with particular emphasis on reaching students and young people. This is the sixteenth video in the series.