Objectivly, the New Deal was created in, about, '34 and by '39 or '40 there was not any perceptable movement on the economic front.

Is someone pumping crack into your water supply? None of this is especially difficult to research.

Go to http://www.measuringworth.org/usgdp/ and plot the GDP from 1920 - 1950. Pay special attention to the per-capita GDP figures from 1929 thru 1940. It plummets from '29 thru '33, then takes off like a rocket thru '37, when Roosevelt tried to balance the budget like a classic rightwinger. Whoops. Then war spending cranks up and the economy goes nuts.

As a cure for the Great Depression, government spending didn't work. In 1933, federal government outlays were $4.5 billion; by 1940 they were $9.4 billion, so FDR more than doubled federal spending, and still unemployment remained stubbornly high.

Stubbornly high, but down to around half of what it had been when that hack Hoover and his Republican cronies in Congress were kicked to the curb by voters.

That's millions of people back to work in the private sector, feeding their families, putting a roof over their heads and spending money in the economy. The unemployment numbers also don't even take into account the millions more put to work by the WPA, many of them building things that were of far more lasting economic value than the crap the private sector had invested billions in prior to the crash of '29 - much of it money that literally evaporated overnight, with NOTHING to show for it.

I'd say that government debt during the Great Depression was money well-spent, though as World War II proved Roosevelt's problem wasn't that he spent too much - it's that he never spent enough. Keynes was ultimately proven correct, which shouldn't come as a terrible surprise since he was probably one of the most intelligent people who ever lived, and the era dominated by his policy recommendations will likely go down as the most prosperous in human history.

How does government pay its employers? From money confiscated via taxation from productive, working people.

Yeah, working people like Bernie Madoff, Roland Arnall, Angelo Mozilo and Dick Fuld.

The idea that "private" money is somehow more "productive" than "public" money is the centerpiece of right wing frootbattery. It has absolutely no basis in reality what-so-ever.

In reality, the private sector is even more likely to waste money in spectacularly non-productive endeavors than the public sector, precisely because so much of its decision making process happens behind closed doors with no accountability or even knowledge of the shareholders. The more concentrated private wealth becomes in the hands of greedy, corrupt idiots the more spectacular the flameouts become.

In this case, private corporations managed to crater the entire financial services sector. These same criminal incompetents then turned around and begged legislative representatives (which they'd bought and paid for) to confiscate working taxpayers money to provide trillions of dollars in corporate handouts to cover their own greed-driven mistakes. Socialism for billionaires.

Now that the incoming Obama Administration is making noises about spending an equally large sum of money on programs to stimulate useful economic activity, these corporate fuckups' useful-idiots on the right are starting to whine like a buzz saw.

I mean, God forbid anybody spend money on productive economic activity. Why, that might pull money away from some of Wall Street's massive scams!!! Dick Fuld might have to get a real job or something, you know where your performance gets evaluated and you have to actually demonstrate you know what you're doing and everything.

What a catastrophe!

But most of them are clearly a couple of tacos short of a combination platter. For example:

No basis in reality? If that were the case, then governments that are the most economically interventionist should have the highest standard of living and a greater per capita income than those where government takes a more 'hands off' approach.

Uh, where did I say that? Oh, that's right - I never said such a thing.

Try wasting less of your copious hot air blowdrying strawmen. You'll look a little less like a dingaling that way.

I love it when any drooling rightwing frootbat cites the useless Heritage Foundation. That always lends your arguments more credibility.

You guys are starting to make the Scientologists look sane.

In the private sector, companies must meet the demands of consumers in order to stay in business, since consumers are free to choose alternative services.

What a load of crap. Seriously, is someone paying you to peddle this tripe?

First of all, you're clearly a moron who's never heard of a thing called a "monopoly", which eliminates the whole "consumer freedom" trope. Not to mention collusion between different actors. So, your understanding of economics is about as advanced as mine was when I was in the sixth grade. Supposedly you run a small business. I have pity on your creditors and employees (if any).

Beyond that though, what we've seen go down in the financial services sector over the past decade shows that survival of the corporate players themselves is irrelevant. People like the Arnalls and Dick Fuld are either corrupt enough or stupid enough (or both) to drive the companies they helm to certain ruin while profiting handsomely all the way to the bitter (for everyone else) end.

Mozilo over at Countrywide is a prime example, raking in over a billion dollars this decade in various forms of compensation while wrecking the company he ran and leaving taxpayers with a hundred-billion dollar mess to clean up. Why should he care if the corporate enterprise itself is kaput? He made his billions.

Lord, spare us from "capitalists" who have a grade school understanding of economics.