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The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters.

The Great War proved how confused the world is. Depression is proving it again.

The Depression was an incredibly dramatic episode - an era of stock-market crashes, breadlines, bank runs and wild currency speculation, with the storm clouds of war gathering ominously in the background... For my money, few periods are so replete with human interest.

If we have an economic crisis in the Western world it's because the government makes up 50 percent or more of the economy. This is a cancer that is taking away people's freedom.

Although this crisis in some ways started in the United States, it is a global crisis. We bear a substantial share of the responsibility for what has happened, but factors that made the crisis so acute and so difficult to contain lie in a broader set of global forces that built up in the years before the start of our current troubles.

Understanding the true causes of the Depression, as well as the real economic record of the United States in the 1930s, is an essential ingredient in anyone's economic and historical education.

An entire nation, it seemed, was standing in one long breadline, desperate for even the barest essentials. It was a crisis of monumental proportions. It was known as the Great Depression.

A long-term crisis, after a certain point, no longer seems like a crisis. It seems like the way things are.

It would be especially tragic if the people who most cherish ideals of peace, who are most anxious for political cooperation on a wider than national scale, made the mistake of underestimating the pace of economic change in our modern world.

It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression.