sad

The typical claim by some economic historians is that: the then "traditional way" of dealing with recessions (austerity, letting prices fall) caused unecessary pain to a lot of people. In the context of Germany however, they go a step further and say that it might have led to the rise of Nazism .

I am aware that the typical Austrian explaination as to why the depression dragged on for so long -the "traditional way" was abandoned- .In the case of America for example Austrians (Murphy, Higgs, Rothbard), argued that Herbert Hoover did not have a laissez-faire response to the Depression and that a lot of what we would associate with The New Deal was spearheaded by him.

I was wondering if there is a similar case to be made for Germany. On whether if Brüning was the Hoover of Germany. (ie. Someone who's accused of having a laissez-faire approach to the depression when in reality it was nothing but)

Mises did spoke of some harmful policies enacted by Germany in response to the depression, in The Causes of the Economic Crisis(1931) and Omnipotent Government but I find them to be allusions more so than actual direct examples.

If any of you have any insights/answers on this please share. Thanks!

One thing I was thinking about recently: whenever I ask people how we are going to pay for their new social program, they always say we will just tax the billionaires, and then look at me bewildered when I say "and how is that gonna fund it long term?"

I'm not entirely against government social programs as is; they can be useful under the right circumstances. My issue comes is that people can never tell you how we are going to consistently fund it in a reasonable way.

"Taxing billionaires" is not going to long term give you enough money to continually run things forever. Okay, let's say we put a 30 percent wealth tax on billionaires.

That's 2.43 in profits for that wealth tax, assuming no capital flight, asset depreciation, etc., and that's for that one year, each year of kept doing that 30 percent, even assuming no depreciation, it'll shrink each year. I've attached a graph to show this.

Now with that 2 trillion, let's look at current social programs, this wealth tax will fund:

Social security... Yeah that's about it, and a little bit of Medicare.

So we've funded social security for 1 year, and we will have less and less each year.

So no, this is not a consistent way of getting revenue for social programs.