Then you probably shouldn't respond, since nothing you said beyond this is relevant.
Here's an excerpt from an article discussing views he frequently espouses in his books.
"Right here and right now there is a widespread belief that the unregulated market is what got us into our present economic predicament, and that the government must "do something" to get the economy moving again. FDR's intervention in the 1930s has often been cited by those who think this way.
What is on that one page in "Out of Work" that could change people's minds? Just a simple table, giving unemployment rates for every month during the entire decade of the 1930s.
Those who think that the stock market crash in October 1929 is what caused the huge unemployment rates of the 1930s will have a hard time reconciling that belief with the data in that table.
Although the big stock market crash occurred in October 1929,
unemployment never reached double digits in any of the next 12 months after that crash. Unemployment peaked at 9 percent, two months after the stock market crashed-- and then began drifting generally downward over the next six months, falling to 6.3 percent by June 1930.
This was what happened in the market, before the federal government decided to "do something."
What the government decided to do in June 1930-- against the advice of literally a thousand economists, who took out newspaper ads warning against it-- was impose higher tariffs, in order to save American jobs by reducing imported goods.
This was the first massive federal intervention to rescue the economy, under President Herbert Hoover, who took pride in being the first President of the United States to intervene to try to get the economy out of an economic downturn.
Within six months after this government intervention, unemployment shot up into double digits-- and stayed in double digits in every month throughout the entire remainder of the decade of the 1930s, as the Roosevelt administration expanded federal intervention far beyond what Hoover had started."
From
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/thomas-sowell-the-myth-of-how-the-great-depression-was-resolved
Let's see, on one side we have Thomas Sowell who uses logic and empirical data while referring to Point A. On the other side we have DBM who resorts to name calling and, since the user knows nothing about Thomas Sowell's work, doesn't even address the same thing. In fact, it seems like Thomas Sowell's approach might have PREVENTED THE GREAT DEPRESSION FROM EVER HAPPENING based on the country slowly healing from the crash until Hoover intervened, and only then spiraling into, as you say, the blackest period in our nation's history. I feel like I am going to have to side with the "donkey" on this one.
Again, Thomas Sowell has written 30 books, citing thousands of sources for empirical data that he meticulously researched, while
you haven't read a single page or listened to a single interview of his yet still have a strong enough opinion about him to resort to name-calling.
“I think we're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional.
We have kids in elementary school who are being urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressmen and presidents about nuclear energy.
They're not a decade old, and they're being thrown these kinds of questions that can absorb the lifetime of a very brilliant and learned man. And they're being taught that it's important to have views, and they're not being taught that it's important to know what you're talking about.
It's important to hear the opposite viewpoint, and more important to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. They disregard that. They hear something, they hear some rhetoric, and they run with it.”
-Thomas Sowell
