Unemployment is used to justify every bigger government programs—from national industrial policies to high military expenditures to a return to New Deal-type “make work” projects. Now, this book relentlessly amasses devastating evidence that the major cause of high unemployment, both cyclical and secular, is government itself.
The authors boldly challenge Keynesian fiscal demand-management and show that such policies as minimum wages, labor controls, unemployment compensation, and welfare have played significant roles in generating joblessness. This book lucidly recounts the history of American unemployment, showing that the policies of both President Hoover and President Roosevelt prolonged and exacerbated unemployment during the Great Depression.
Here is a powerful rebuttal to the prevailing myths about unemployment and the government’s role in combating it. And it also points the way toward reforms that would have a meaningful, lasting impact on unemployment in the United States.
Lowell E. Gallaway
Lowell E. Gallaway is Distinguished Professor of Economics and Faculty Associate in the Contemporary History Institute at Ohio University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Ohio State University and he has been Staff Economist at the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress; Chief, Analytic Studies Section at the Social Security Administration; Visiting Professor at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), University of Minnesota, University of New South Wales, University of Texas (Arlington), and Lund University; Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania; and Assistant Professor at San Fernando Valley State College and Colorado State University.
Having authored forty monographs and more than 200 articles and reviews in scholarly journals, Professor Gallaway is also the author of the books, Manpower Economics; Interindustry Labor Mobility in the United States, 1957 to 1960; Geographic Labor Mobility in the United States, 1957 to 1960; Poverty in America; Poverty, Income Distribution, the Family and Public Policy (with Richard Vedder); and Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America (with Richard Vedder).
Richard K. Vedder
Richard K. Vedder is an American economist, historian, author, columnist, and currently distinguished professor of economics emeritus at Ohio University.
Born in 1940, Vedder earned his B.A. in economics at Northwestern University in 1962 and his Ph.D in economics at the University of Illinois in 1965. He has since studied U.S. economic history, particularly as it relates to public policy. Some of his specific research has involved American immigration, economic issues inAmerican education, and the interrelationship between labor and capital markets.
Vedder serves as an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think tank known for mostly libertarian and conservative perspectives. He has served as an economist with Congress' Joint Economic Committee. In his role with the AEI, he later testified before the Committee on October 30, 2008. He is also director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington, D.C.
Vedder's scholarly writings have appeared in journals such as Explorations in Economic History, The Journal of Economic History, and Agricultural History. He has written over two hundred such scholarly articles. Vedder's popular interest writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Investor's Business Daily, and the Christian Science Monitor.
He has published the books The American Economy in Historical Perspective, Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America (with Lowell Gallaway),Can Teachers Own Their Own Schools?, Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much,[2] and The Wal-Mart Revolution: How Big-Box Stores Benefit Consumers, Workers, and the Economy (with Wendell Cox).