Competent? Competent? I can come up with a ton of terms to describe that tiny Austrian fuckhead with a bad taste in beards, yes even positive ones, but competent is very much not one of them.
Also, post-1933 economic boom was pretty much a straw fire - it relied on borrowing with a declaration of war taking the place of paying back.
As an economist (well, grad student), I disagree with this. While Hitler's intent was clearly not good economic management, he did pursue sound economic policies until around '37 or so (I don't remember the exact year here). At that point he started using deficit spending to stimulate an already full employment economy but that was domestic borrowing. Remember, Germany was extremely constrained in it's ability to secure foreign credit. Remember that it was the Soviets who were recipients of German credit, not the other way around. And while it was probably "unsustainable" the eventual outcome would just be a fiscal tightening in a full employment situation, i.e. a better outcome then what France, UK and the US were experiencing.
Hitler's economic policy was actually pretty terrible if improving the lot of the German people was the goal, and it wasn't any better before the Second World War. What did he do?
-Paid women in the form of vouchers to stay at home instead of looking for work. Since you have to be looking for a job to be considered "unemployed", this improved Germany's unemployment rate substantially on paper. In real terms, however, this basically cut German production of goods substantially (women that would have had actual jobs were now sitting around at home) and cut the German workforce, without actually getting many new jobs created (since women were looking for different jobs from men, so those unemployed German men's prospects weren't much improved).
-German unions were basically destroyed by raids and made powerless, so they were no longer capable of demanding higher wages, which resulted in more hiring. This is in contrast to the situation in most other countries affected by the Depression, where unions held wages higher for existing workers, resulting in higher unemployment.
-Those remaining unemployed were basically forced to take jobs by the government that often paid less than they had received from welfare previously, with the alternative being the threat of getting tossed into a concentration camp. So these several million Germans were nominally employed, but were literal wage slaves that were barely getting by.
So yeah, the Germans had "full employment", though that's pretty meaningless when it comes through literal slavery to the state. Source is Richard Evans' Third Reich trilogy, in case you're wondering.
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Topic: Sheb's European Megathread: Remove Feta! (Read 1780911 times)