THE BIG DUMMY

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Americans desperately needed bargains. But President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed laws that forced businesses to charge above-market prices for everything. He made discounting a crime!

FDR did this even though antitrust laws provided penalties for private individuals who acted in restraint of trade and charged above-market prices. These laws were passed by “progressives” – his ideological brethren.

First came FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act, considered the flagship of the New Deal. FDR signed that in June 1933, climaxing his heroic Hundred Days of legislative mania. Back then, the economic situation was considered so urgent that members of Congress didn’t have time to seriously debate FDR’s proposals. The members probably didn’t have time to read the bills, either, before the voting began. Possibly, the Hundred Days began the American tradition of having members of Congress vote on bills they haven’t read. In any case, The National Industrial Recovery Act authorized the president to establish cartels via executive orders. He established some 500 cartels, and one of the things they did was fix prices above market levels.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933), another triumph of the Hundred Days, aimed to raise prices of agricultural commodities above market levels, in an effort to raise farm incomes. Apparently the authors of the Agricultural Adjustment Act weren’t particularly concerned about the three-quarters of the U.S. population who weren’t farmers and had to pay more for food. Jim Powell, LewRockwell.com

-flynn