This Day in History: British economist, John Maynard Keynes died on this day in 1946. His Kenyesian economic theory can perhaps be summarized in 7 words: "governments should spend money they don't have." His greatest work was "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money." Richard M. Ebeling wrote of this book: "Few books, in so short a time, have gained such wide influence and generated so destructive an impact on public policy. What Keynes succeeded in doing was to provide a rationale for what governments always like to do: spend money and pander to special interests... Keynes’s legacy has given us paper-money inflation, government deficit spending, and more political intervention throughout the market."
"Keynes became the most famous economist of the 20th century and the guru-crank whose work has inspired thousands of failed economic experiments and continues to inspire them today. He is the Svengali-like figure who implausibly convinced the world that saving is bad, inflation cures unemployment, investment can and should be socialized, consumers are fools whose interests should be dismissed, and capital can be made non-scarce by driving interest rates to zero – thereby turning the hard work of many hundreds of years by economists on its head."~Lew Rockwell
The trillions of dollars in debt we now find ourselves in is the legacy of John Maynard Keynes, and at some point there has to be a reckoning. Keynes was not concerned with the future consequences of his policies, because, as he says: “In the long run we are all dead.”
In an earlier work, Keynes knew of the dangers of his economic system. In an earlier work of his, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" he wrote, "Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some."
See also The History & Mystery of Money & Economics-250 Books on DVDrom
Visit my Econ blog at http://fredericbastiat1850.blogspot.com/
For a list of all of my disks and ebooks (PDF and Amazon) click here
Visit my Econ blog at http://fredericbastiat1850.blogspot.com/
For a list of all of my disks and ebooks (PDF and Amazon) click here
No comments:
Post a Comment