Are there any decent books or articles from the Austrian school on the FDR era of the US?
Recently have been listening to Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression, and while it covers the twenties up to FDR getting in well, there’s a couple of parts
One being Rothbard explicitly notes that the FDR new deal era has been so covered that there wouldn’t be much of a point in covering them; however, even as an American there really isn’t much that I’ve been exposed to regarding that 13 year period especially from the Austrian perspective.
I vaguely know some of the things that were tried like the first half being more of a “we have to do something” attitude that continued the bizarre crop withholding practices (that I didn’t know started with Hoover and even earlier), the WPA, various public works stuff like the TVA (which is a dam network?). Apparently later on they tried more direct command economy rationing measures starting in the late 30s and then especially when the war started but again I really don’t know much about this. It’s especially ironic given that I live here and the events weren’t so long ago but such is life.
On another note, Rothbard says that Mises had somehow figured out that specific factors and conditions don’t explain as much as thought experiments, the explanation being something like the impossibility of isolating all of the factors in something like economics making experimental data impossible to truly find. This doesn’t seem right though, it seems clear that something that makes sense in the mental could easily not bear true in the real one. I understand Rothbard gave a shorthand version of the argument but I can’t really see why not testing things outside of the mind is somehow better. The Keynesian way of equations and whatnot doesn’t work in reality either, nor does the Marxian but not testing things in the real world seems like a poor way of thinking even if the principles of Austrian economics are better. Can anyone explain the argument or what mises was thinking better?
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