Hi dougjn; I think the tariff problems (and the resulting decrease in international trade) in the great depression were largely a result of labor influences in each country. There was no way the US could have stopped the trend. If the US had been unaffected (as the US has so far largely been in the current crisis), then the US could have maybe hauled the rest of the world out of its doldrums earlier, but that was not the case.
A drowning man can't save another drowning man. Instead, they just push each other down faster. The times were ugly, and there was no way out, much less an easy way out.
We like to believe that all political or economic problems have a solution, but that is not always the case. We like to think that the government can take care of us, but it generally cannot. We like to think that the leaders of our country know what they are doing, but the evidence does not suggest so. (In fact, most of them are barely able to take care of themselves, much less the rest of us.)
If it were so easy to force the economy to be good, a whole bunch of countries would have already done this. We like to think that this time is different because we are smarter than other were before, but this is not likely to be the case, either. Humans have always been pretty sharp. And the guys in the nasty third world countries (that, until recently, have suffered what is essentially a permanent depression) are not stupid either.
The third world has tried all kinds of things to make their economies grow. Very few of them have grown much.
The basic problem is that humans are extremely difficult to control.
-- Carl |
