President Hoover and the Great Depression

I've been reading my assigned book, "The Great Depression and the New Deal", so a lot of my postings will come from my thoughts related to that book.That being said, today I read about the presidency of Hoover.

The Core of His Beliefs
President Hoover took the reigns of the presidency during the beginning of the great depression. He has been highly criticized for not doing enough during the countrie's time of need to prevent the crisis from spreading further.

I found a quote in the second chapter of the book that lets us deeper into Hoover's mind on his perspective on things. "He opposed federal relief on principle, believing that Americans risked being plunged into socialism and collectivim if the federal govenement provided aid directly to its citizens."
Hoover belived in very little government intervention. He believed that issues should first be handled by the citizens theselves with the help of private businesses and institutions, then if not solved the problem should reside on the shoulders of the city and state governments. If those instituations could not solve the problem THEN should the government provide relief.

Action Taken By Hoover
It was a time when people were trying to live frugally as possible, living in fear that they could easily have their hours cut or wage reduced at work, or even lose their job. One of the actions that Hoover took was to have business owners to agree to not reduce the wages of their employees. The issue with this action was that "the businessmen's pledge to uphold wage rates said nothing about whether they would reduce hours or lay workers off, and they did both."

Hoover raised tarrifs on imported goods in the United States. After the Government raised the tarrifs it had a ripple effect and other countries did so as well in retalliation. By making tarrifs higher world-wide, there were higher barriers to international trade due to its higher costs, so as a result the world trade decreased 25% in volume.

When Government Intervenes
I feel that the actions taken by Hoover demonstrate what happens when the hands of the government intervene with the business world. When tarrifs were raised by the government it had a large affect on businesses that were trading with the world, and it chain reacted to every nation, causing a collapse in world trade which is necesary for a well established economy to thrive.

Also, when he had businesses not decrease the wages of workers, it caused them to have to use the alternative method of simply firing people because they had to reduce labor expesnes in some form or another, and it became the only option. If you can't decrease wages from everyone as a whole, in result you have to let people go. I believe that Hoover's actions were in contradiction to his core beliefs of preventing massive governemtn intervention.

I strongly belive that the goverrnment should be as basic as possible, doing things that protect our constitutional rights without intervening too much in the free market.