Obama might be the dumbest president we have ever had.

[Jackson50]

Avinash_Tyagi said:

Except that's not what happened jackson, unemployment fell, so obviously any effect from wage inflation towards unemployment was negligible at best, government intervention was a much bigger positive than negative.

Comapnies that try to artificailly increase prices beyond what the market will accept will not survive, as I said its demand driven, look at Sony which is having more and more trouble because they bucked what the market would accept, so your assumption that its an important thing to go after fails on that simple point.

Yes you're exactly right hat government intervention lowered the unemployment rate, kind of defeats your argument that government intervention prolonged the Depression then doesn't it?

Sorry but its reaching to say that the recovery would have been quicker, since it was only when the US actually entered the war that the economy was brought out of the Depression, since our date of entry would not have changed, recovery would have been on the same schedule

Also citing right wing whack job economists isn't going to sway me to your argument, these are the guys who argued that the new deal didn't do anything for unemployment, when it obviously did

Yes, unemployment certainly decreased. Markedly decreasing total hours worked and increasing government spending will obviously effect unemployment numbers. Only someone with an ideological bent would deny that. Nevertheless, this does not signify that artificially inflating wages had negligible to no effect on employment. In fact, unemployment was 25% higher than it should have been absent the wage policies. Had those policies not been enacted, the unemployment rate would have been decidedly lower. I implore everyone to read the paper I posted. They are not right-wing, whack-job economists. They are employed by UCLA and the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis. They also praised certain elements (FDIC, SEC, unemployment benefits) of Roosevelt's New Deal.

Companies will not survive because there are alternatives. Sony bucked market trends and failed because there were alternatives in Nintendo and Microsoft. The problem with the policies is that there were no alternatives. Companies in the same industries were allowed to collusively price fix their products. For example, in the mid-30s, prices for US steel were 50% higher than foreign steel prices. This type of collusion, that the government typically prevented, was allowed by the government.

No, that does not defeat my argument. Not all forms of Government interference have similar effects.