ABSTRACT
This was equally true during the Great Depression. In the United States, for example, it was the very ease with which goods and services and particularly physical capital could be produced that caused the problem by saturating demand and leaving us with the bitter irony of excess capacity in the face of desperate want. The diffi culty was not in devising a means by which to effectively boost economic activity, but to develop a policy that was perceived as right and just and fair. The New Deal was resisted not because people did not think it would work, but because it was viewed (particularly by those in the business community) as “socialist” and therefore un-American.
