Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Donald J Boudreaux
“My teacher announced, as if it were a fact as firm as any law of thermodynamics, that the Great Depression was caused by laissez-faire policies advocated by Smith, and that salvation came from the more scientifically sound ideas of Keynes — ideas expertly put into practice by Franklin Roosevelt. ‘Depressions are a thing of the past,’ my teacher proclaimed. ‘Keynes taught us how to prevent them.’ ‘Cool!’ I recall thinking with as much relief as a 15-year-old can muster about such matters. Seven years later, I graduated from college with a degree in economics. By then I’d learned that my high-school history teacher’s history was bunk. The Great Depression wasn’t a failure of capitalism or of the ideas of Adam Smith. Instead, it was caused chiefly by the Federal Reserve foolishly allowing the money supply to shrink by more than a third.” (12/14/25)
https://fee.org/articles/fake-history-is-giving-capitalism-a-bad-name/