The bottom line is that the 1929 crash was just that, a crash. The recession that followed it was a bit severe, but it was in line with economic downturns of the past.

Wrong. Not just wrong - BS. The Great Depression kicked off with a horrifying crash, not only in the stock market, but also in the GDP, in consumer spending, a dramatic rise in unemployment, etc. The GDP not only didn't recover after a couple of years, or just stop falling, it continued to decline dramatically until Roosevelt was in office and began enacting pieces of the New Deal.

The recession wasn't "a bit severe". It was horrifying, global, and continued getting worse for several years. It was not a "recession" in any conventional use of the term.

Curiously, the first country to really climb out of the Great Depression was Japan. How'd they do it? Free market idiocy? Balanced Federal budgets? Private sector ingenuity?

Nope. Try massive deficit spending and currency devaluation. The Japanese government went on a spending spree.

It worked so well that by the mid-30's the Japanese government had to enact wage and price controls in order to keep inflation under control. Over the course of a decade they transformed their economy from one dominated by light industry to one dominated by heavy industry. Their textile exports displaced Great Britain's, after more than a century of dominance in that sphere, and set the stage for Japan's eventual rise as a global military giant.

Here's hoping the Obama Administration learns from their success. With interest rates at all-time lows and investors seeking the perceived stability of US Government Bonds, now is the perfect time to borrow gobs of money to spend on infrastructure development. It certainly beats the trillions rightwingers borrowed to waste on non-performing boondoggles like their Iraq misadventure.

If you check out most of the rightwingers' posts to this article, you'll see that they're newbies here to Salon and that these are their first posts on the site.

Sirota's article was like a rock thru a hornets nest. The libertarian dingalings are all in a big tizzy now. It's like somebody went and shit on Ayn Rand's grave or something.

I should point out that in his eight years as president, Bush passed a 50% increase in steel tariffs, nationalized airport security, nationalized Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, supported a raise in minimum wage

Blah blah blah blah blah. The rightwingers also repealed Glass-Stegall, reassigned thousands of FBI agents formerly dedicated to financial fraud to other tasks (i.e. left the henhouse for the foxes), put crooks in charge of the FTC and OTS, spent trillions on useless foreign military misadventures and turned a blind eye to a massive wave of obviously-fraudulent interest only, stated income, no money down mortgages - none of which lenders were obliged to offer, in contrast to the repeated, baseless claims of shrill rightwing dingalings. The fact that many lending institutions have survived and even prospered during this period without filling their portfolios with fraudulent crap should be the first indication this repeated rightwing trope is as baseless as the rest of their political and economic philosophy. I mean, really, even children wouldn't fall for this crap.

Do you clowns assume everyone is as stupid / nuts as you are? Bad assumption. But at least you're consistent in that regard.

Gee, thanks for the warm welcome, the insults, and the honest appraisal of our views.

Hey, when a puppy shits on your carpet, you need to rub his nose in it to let him know that's not acceptable behavior.

I love the whining noise you nitwits make when someone rubs your noses in the facts, though! Because, unlike an ignorant little puppy, you clowns really ought to know better than to come peddling your baseless lies. Especially these days, when your whole warped world view has been revealed as the delusional scam those in the center and on the left always said it was.

America in the 1930's was overwhelmingly an agricultural society, with well over 90% living on farms.

Wow! Conservative idiocy knows no bounds. You really are a Grade A nitwit. No wonder your worldview doesn't exhibit even a tenuous connection to reality.

It took literally two seconds to Google your latest belch of inanity into the crapper:

http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/May07SpecialIssue/Indicators/rural_inthelongrun2.htm

To quote:

Farm population has fallen steadily as a share of total U.S. population for more than a century. Less than half the U.S. population has lived on farms since these data were first collected in 1880.

Got any more bon mots of wisdom there, freeptard?

It's amazing, isn't it. Every time they regurgitate some rightwing "fact", it takes literally a couple of seconds on Google to demonstrate that, yet again, they don't know what the hell they're talking about.

No wonder they're so consistently wrong. That idiot JT_Lancer is the perfect example. Brand new to Salon, 49(!) posts in a little over 12 hours, and virtually every one of them either fact-free or jumping to some truly ludicrous conclusion.

If anybody wants to know why people were crazy enough to burn old women as witches during the Middle Ages, you need only look at JT_Lancer's spew in this comments thread. He would have been one of the toothless, stinking nutjobs brandishing torches.

One of the things the Cold War taught us was that national security and government intervention in the economy are not mutually exclusive. When national security was at stake, the "market" argument actually got less slack. Preventing communism was too important to chance on the free market.

Word.