Great Depression Myths

John Stossel's latest column builds on an interview with economist Donald Boudreaux to challenge anticapitalist myths about the Great Depression and the Great Recession that are rearing their ugly heads yet again.One myth that I hadn't seen debunked before was that World War II helped end the Depression:The Depression continued for more than a decade, until, according to the Library of Congress, "Mobilizing the economy for world war finally cured the depression."That's a myth, too, says Boudreaux."Unemployment fell. That's not hard to do when you conscript 2.5 million men into the military. But If you look at the actual performance of the economy, that didn't recover until the late 1940s."It recovered, says Boudreaux, because "Republicans won the 1946 election, and they were more pro-investor, pro-business than the Democrats." And FDR died. "Harry Truman was less vigorously opposed to capitalists ... .So investors were finally confident to come back into the playing field."That…