From David Stockman, “The Epochal Consequences Of Woodrow Wilson’s War,” at davidstockmanscontracorner.com:
In short, the Great Depression was a unique historical event owing to the vast financial deformations of the Great War——deformations which were drastically exaggerated by its prolongation from Wilson’s intervention and the massive credit expansion unleashed by the Fed and Bank of England during and after the war.
Stated differently, the trauma of the 1930s was not the result of the inherent flaws or purported cyclical instabilities of free market capitalism; it was, instead, the delayed legacy of the financial carnage of the Great War and the failed 1920s efforts to restore the liberal order of sound money, open trade and unimpeded money and capital flows.
But this trauma was thoroughly misunderstood, and therefore did give rise to the curse of Keynesian economics and did unleash the politicians to meddle in virtually every aspect of economic life, culminating in the statist and crony capitalist dystopia that has emerged in this century.
Needless to say, that is Thomas Woodrow Wilson’s worst sin of all.
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/the-epochal-consequences-of-woodrow-wilsons-war/
Mr. Stockman is telling the verifiable truth about the Great Depression and the New Deal. It is not the story one gets from most of the histories written about that time. Unfortunately, history is written by the winners, and statists clearly “won” the 1930s, turning that decade into a propaganda victory for never-ending expansion of the government and diminution of individual rights.
