I saw a loyalist Labour MP on the BBC news channel a few weeks back defending Gordon Brown (no really). I don't recall his name but he looked a little like mad-eye Moody in one of the Harry Potter films. Anyway he siad something about the depression in Britain being caused by Churchill's decision to go back onto the gold standard. I couldn't swear to it but I think the term 'knee jerk reaction' was used.
The decision to return to the gold standard after the debts and inflation of WWI is a rare example of a government attempting to honour its debts. What should have happened was that wage rates should have fallen back towards their pre war inflation nominal levels while maintaining their real value. That didn't happen because the British labour market at the time was not a free market where wages were allowed to reflect the results of supply and demand.
The more powerful unions insisted in no cuts in the face value of their members pay packets. This put the real cost of labour up well above the would be market level, so increasing unemployment.The Unions used their monopoly power of labour supply to keep their working members standard of living at an artificially high level, at the expense of the total number of jobs available.
Meanwhile the employers were forced to spend their wage bill to employ a smaller number of workers than they would like, and so total output fell.
The apparent Keynesian solution to this problem after WWII with its trade off between some inflation in order to increase total output and employment was in part successful by inflation reducing the real value of the nominal wage rates the unions were so determined to maintain, back down to the actual market rate.

From 'The Economics of Everyday Life' by Gertrude Williams

'When unemployment meant starvation or the workhouse, the trade union secretary realized that it was impolitic to persue a course of action which would face his unemployed members with the alternatives of remaining out of work or accepting jobs at blackleg rates of pay. And a prolonged depression in atre inevitably showed itself in an agreement to lower wages. But the trade union has a very strong hold on the loyalty of its members and there are few who would dream of undercutting, so long as the unemployment insurance benefit provides, at least, sufficient to let one get along. The effect of this was seen during the chronic depression of the inter-war years when although there were at times as many as 23 per cent of the insured population out of work, wage rates fell hardly at all, and when, indeed, if we take into account the fall in the price of foods during this period - real wages rose quite considerably.Here we have an entirely new phenomenon, and one that has, as we shall see shortly, a very important influence on the occupational distribution of the population. As a consequence, on the one hand, of wage rates fixed by collective bargaining, and, on the other, of the provision of a 'cushion' of social security payments to break the fall in the standard of living of those who are not earning a livelihood by their own work, there has come to be a very great element of rigidity in wages. Once rates have risen, it is extraordinarily difficult to bring them down, whatever the level of prosperity in the industry and whatever the rate of unemployment.'

Quite a funny little article in the Sunday Times about Sarah Palin being the subject of much male admiration

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/india_knight/article4692219.ece

Not sure about that it tells the full story though.

'Nothing to do with her shooting moose, then? Nope: the attraction is basic and physical.'

It might actually have something to do with the moose hunting. Although Sarah Palin may not believe in evolution, maybe evolutionary psychology has something to add. According to the theory many impulses and behaviours are explained by being useful to our hunter gatherer ancestors through thousands of generations in the stone age.

In those days men home to bring home the bacon (or moose or whatever), the most successful being the ones being rewarded with the chance to pass on there genes with the pick of the attractive, fertile females. Now Governor Palin is widely considered attractive, and is certainly fertile. But better yet, she goes out in the freezing wastes and brings home the moose so you don't have to. From the cavemen point of view she's as good as Raquel Welch in 'One Million Years BC'.

http://www.art.co.uk/asp/sp-asp/_/PD--12147391/SP--A/IGID--812883/Raquel_Welch.htm?sOrig=CAT&sOrigID=10581&ui=432FD1368AEA4063893971864A5ACA84

But whereas Raquel talked the talk (or rather grunted the grunt), Palin walks the walk. Also when she gets home with the moose, there's noting for it but to snuggle up in the bearskin, (bear previously killed and skinned by the divine Sarah) and settle in for the six month Arctic winter night. And how are you going to pass the time, well scrabble hadn't yet been invented in the neolithic age, and would anyway be pretty boring with just the letters 'u' and 'g', so you have to use you imagination.