A journalistic blast from our 1969 past reappeared on the Web yesterday in a couple of places, most notably on the Ludwig von Mises site.

Entitled simply enough "The Great Depression," the article from happier days is an masterful dissection of how governmental folly–stretching from Grover Cleveland (the inflationist) to Herbert Hoover and FDR (the depressionists)–created and sustained the unnecessary economic coma known as, well, the title of the article.

The author was Hans F. Sennholz, the nation’s first doctoral candidate under Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. Not unlike his mentor, Sennholz shows off his monetarist passions in his article, altogether not a bad trait to have in these days of Keynsian Kool-Aid.

His conclusion is fascinating:

Social and economic decline is facilitated by moral decay. Surely, the Great Depression would be inconceivable without the growth of covetousness and envy of great personal wealth and income, the mounting desire for public assistance and favors. It would be inconceivable without an ominous decline of individual independence and self-reliance, and above all, the burning desire to be free from man’s bondage and to be responsible to God alone.  

Can it happen again? Inexorable economic law ascertains that it must happen again whenever we repeat the dreadful errors that generated the Great Depression.

Four decades later and we’ve answered his question–resoundingly.