Amen Manus.  When the country gets bigger and shoves its collective hands where private business and families should take over, it is never good.  Examples: SS, child support, affirmative action, welfare (abuse), bailouts due to bad corporate structure that lead to a spa treatment and continued mess...

Ever hear the term "The cure is worse then the disease."

So now you are "proving" your point about unemployment with statistics about...bank suspensions.  Does.not.compute.

It's my belief that your "rebuttal" on the unemployment point is ridiculous on its face. The banking statistic was simply me pointing out an instance where New Deal reform clearly had good effect.  [edit:  see edit.]

Even so, it's a fair rebuttal to elprincipe's "the cure does not exist".  Although I have to say that elprincipe had already proved himself wrong by claiming that GOVERNMENT military demand in WWII pulled us out of the Depression.

I'm not saying that Germany and Russia were great by any means, I'm saying that since their since economies prospered during the Great Depression that it proves the idea that 'all government intervention is bad' is wrong. 

The extreme government interaction led to Nazism and "Communism"  that lead to two of the worst killing sprees in the history of the world.

I'd say your arguement is a bit off base.  Furthermore, their intervention was much more solid.

To use other governments as a case study that used much more drastic means seems like a bad move.

Though can we claim for sure that it was the New Deal that actually caused it to happen or that it was a natural turn?

After all the general basis behind the great depression in the "New Deal" term of thoughts is that it was caused by the rich becoming richer, and the poor not having enough money to mass consume.   Yet now, the distribution of wealth is far higher then in those days.

Such things are hard to explain and figure out... espiecially when you only have one level of data points.

Though this is almost the right era to discuss things according to the "Seventh Generation" standard.

Though i imagine that may be why you have a more earnest argueing over whether the New Deal actually was helpfull or not or who it was helpful for.

Is your argument that in order for government intervention to work it has to be extreme?

A better case for my idealogy would be Scandinavia, but prosperity during the Great Depression is a easy example to look at to disprove the notion that government intervention hurts the economy.

Exactly, I was actually going to ask what was the difference between the federal government's spending in the new deal gettin the US out of the depression and the federal government's spending in WWII getting the US out of the depression, especially when the former spending is useful in terms of infrastructure existing after the spending whilst the second is less useful as detonated bombs and fired bullets don't help the economy past their initial creation (though they help in that factories are built to make them the product itself doesn't unlike when the product is a road or a bridge...).

However I haven't especially put much thought in it so if one of you guys has an argument why government spending is better in one case than the other or a link to an article making the case I would be genuinely interested to read it.