Did roosevelts new deal prolong the great depression ??
Short answer: yes. Many articles have been written on this point, but the most accessible treatment I know of it is the recent best-selling book by Amity Shlaes, *The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression* (2007). The following owes much to her. New Deal supporters are very poor at explaining why, if the New Deal was so good, the major problems persisted for TEN years! This is not to say that NONE of the programs did any good. At the least, several of them provided relief to some real suffering. The problem is that they did very little to help the economy itself rebound (which would do much MORE to relieve the suffering!) Shlaes (and others) point out that all the government activism, first of Hoover, and then much more by FDR, DE-stabilized the business environment. Long-term growth, job and wealth production, depends on REMOVING onerous burdens and penalties on those who take the risks and make the big investments. Aside from the burdens themselves, one of the WORST th
