Posted on 10/13/2014 11:14:17 AM PDT by Kaslin
“Many of the negative comments above address leftist distortions about what Keynes actually said. Keynes was no Keynesian (as that term is fondly used by today’s tax-and-spend big-government advocates).”
Keynes made his feelings known through an anecdote about the time that he attended a meeting of ‘Keynesians’. When he returned home at the end of the evening he told his wife Lydia “I was the only non-Keynesian there”.
He gets blamed for a lot of policies that he didn’t advocate. They were actually the policies of socialists who called themselves Kenynesians.
Keynes believed the government should tax high in the good years and then drop taxes in the bad years and the government then gives back what it took in the good years to smooth out the bad years.
Keynesians believe you tax high in the good years and tax higher in the bad years and keep raising taxes because well they get more money to buy more votes by spending more money on government pork.
Galbraith himself was a ‘Keynesian’. Keynes is at least a generation older than John Kenneth Galbraith and had written his ‘Economic Consequences of the Peace’ when Galbraith was still a young teenager.
That’s right. Keynes also advocated reducing government spending and paying down debt during the good years so that you could be free to spend during the bad times.
The big flaw in Keynes is that politicians don’t work that way and never will. They don’t look at the long term and will continue to spend during the boom times and constantly increase the amount of debt.
When we operated under the gold standard of Bretton Woods there was still a feedback mechanism to work on Congress to hold spending in check- but again politics won out. Kennedy was the first to ignore a simmering inflation, which only increased under LBJ. And then Nixon scrapped Bretton Woods and cut the dollar loose from gold. The decline of dollar since 1971 is no coincidence.
So how is this all working for us?
not real well....
I tried that book as well and found it unreadable. The official interpretation you speak of comes from Paul Samuelson and John Hicks. They must have had magic spectacles to decode Keynes’ writing or they got his ideas from some other source.
Short answer, no. Long answer, hell no.
Keynes suggested before his death that the original was a parody. It was, in fact, written very like those theses that MIT students and others from time to time get accepted into the peer reviewed journals after which the writers announce that it was all a nonsense conglomeration of jargon and tautology. Keynes got accepted and promoted before he got to the point of announcing his Hoax and kept his mouth shut, maybe.
Yes, yes.
Ya know .... after I wrote that, I thought I had better look, myself. Keynes may have been older, but was not mentioned in that class.
So, in response, who was “the man with the plan”, in the time of The Founding Fathers?
Might we return to THAT person’s writings?
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