Krugman: Spend Now, Save Later

[Final-Fan]

mrstickball said:

Final-Fan said:
[...]
 I believe that your comment about the Dust Bowl is completely incorrect.  The seeds of destruction in that case were sown many years before the crash, and in fact part of Roosevelt's famous first 100 days were focused on repairing the ecological damage.  1929-1933 is not enough time for those farmers to seriously ass-rape the topsoil the way they did. 

Or did you mean they were encouraged to abuse the land before then?  Wikipedia indicates, and this agrees with my dim recollection of research years ago for school, that vast areas had been overfarmed and/or poorly farmed for decades and the Dust Bowl was a more or less inevitable result; the problem was already happening but was turned into a sudden catastrophe because of a severe drought.  If that is what you meant I would ask you to show that the government was the primary factor in this sort of behavior. 

The result of all this was improved (ecologically sound, more sustainable) farming techniques and land usage tactics (not sure if there is better terminology) which was in large part mandated by the government, and at the LEAST the government played a key role in educating the farmers as to these methods.  As opposed to letting them figure it out on their own a la laissez faire. 

Blah. I lost all of what I put. I'll try to explain it again :-p

If you research about farming in the locations of the dust bowl - the prime culprits of who over-farmed, and caused the dust bowl - you will find out why they were there in the first place.. The government gave the land away for people to farm there. It wasn't a free market exchange of land - it was given to people for free. That is where I take issue with the causes of the dust bowl. Had the government not of intentionally incentivized the farming of these areas, I don't believe that the dust bowl would of happened...If not severely diminished from what we saw, as better ecological practices would of been in place later on, when it may have reached farming levels like we saw in the 20's.

That's where my beef with a lot of federal practices are - they cause a problem (Community Reinvestment Act of 1999, Smoot-Hawley, ect) then have to fix it using our money - essentially screwing us both ways. You can argue that laissez faire caused problems in the dust bowl, but the truth was that intervention caused it...Thus negating the ability for typical laissez faire means to rectify the problem, because government has the power to royally screw things up more than individual people...Which is why I'm not a big fan of them handling stimulus funding.

Ultimately, I believe that the governmental powers should lie primarily with local and state governments, and not federal powers. America is a big freaking country - 300 million and an area larger than almost anywhere else in the world. Trusting one entity in Washington DC is not the way to solve Americas problems. If Ohio has a problem, I want an Ohioan to fix it. Federal powers should only exist in areas that are consequential to everyone, and not simply where the federal government decides that it should be involved in. Comparatively, I think thats why you have rugged government efficiency in areas of Europe - small federal governments in small nations where people are closer to their politicians. For anyone to agree in the United States (like a president), you have to have ~50% of every American interested in the candidate....How often can you find a good agreeable candidate for those many people? Thats why we get retards like the past few presidents we've had.

1.  They didn't actually GIVE it away IIRC, I think it was something like $1 an acre.  What market price do you suppose would have been fair for Godforsaken prairie 200 miles from nowhere? 

2.  Who says it was the mere fact that it was being farmed that caused problems?  Instead of, say, overly-intensive farming and/or farming using poor techniques, that government did not encourage that I am aware of?