A SHORT HISTORY OF RIGHT WING DESTRUCTION PART 7

Republican Herbert Hoover followed Calvin Coolidge into the White House and inherited a booming economy.

But the stock market crashed in 1929 and set off the Great Depression.  Hoover believed in a hands off approach from government, that the markets would right themselves, and that normalcy would return.  But it didn't happen.

Historians Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager observe in A Pocket History of the United States:  "In the case of the 1929 panic there were factors that led, clearly enough, to the collapse.  In the first place, the productive capacity of the nation was greater than its capacity to consume.  This was largely because too large a part of national income was going to a small percentage of the population who promptly turned it back into savings or investment, and not enough of the income to the labor, farmer, and white-collar classes upon whose continued ability to buy the whole business system rested."  Disparity of wealth and income, concentration of wealth, and other similarities abound, don't they?