The dust bowl

[william the wie]

The drought of 1930-9 seems to have triggered what looks to me like more than 5 GDPs of writedowns prior to the 1931 bank panics. That seems to have overwhelmed the exit strategy from the 1915-20 farmland bubble, the Power Act of 1920. This act funded the takeover of the best farmland in the country through the building of hydroelectric dams so the upstream bottomland was sunk and the downstream bottomland lost their riparian rights while being compensated by eminent domain.

That leads me to a simple question why is this massive problem ignored in theories of what caused the great depression? After all pricing marginal New Mexico sheep pastures as prime wheat farmland despite irrigation with water rich in run off from arsenic containing mining tailings is sort of a big problem but I am not aware of any economic theories or histories that deal with this problem, anyone know of any?

 

[HelenaHandbag]

Trying to bait libertarians into arguing the obvious case that government creates the problems, then acts like outside bystanders with the solutions at the ready, aren't ya?

 

[shart_attack]

I actually have a coupla aunts who survived the Dust Bowl in western Arkansas.

None of them say that eminent domain had anything to do with it.