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First: watch the rap battle. Avoiding (or urging the avoiding) of contrarian ideas is how you perpetuate ignorance. If Keynes is worth is weight in stimulus,

First: watch the rap battle. Avoiding (or urging the avoiding) of contrarian ideas is how you perpetuate ignorance. If Keynes is worth is weight in stimulus, he'll be able to withstand the counter argument and win the day: if not, then there's even greater reason to see other perspectives. Sorry, but not buying your argument. If anything we can attribute a greater length of the Great Depression to the Keynesian inspired policies, not a repair (assuming that is the "fixed" economy attributed to Keynes). For some reference on this consider: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409 http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-D... WW II ended the Depression insofar as its impact on employment, but it also destroyed (literally) massive amounts of accumulated capital. Global quality of life was greatly reduced: a failure by any rational standard. I suspect the necessary economic restructuring for war, and the later return to a peacetime economy, has much more to do with the repair of the economy that anything Keynes ever conjured. Later we have substantial numbers of completely unimpressive Keynesianesque experiments, including our own current "recovery". For Hayek (or similar) you are correct: there are really no instances of his policies repairing an economy... but could you tell me how many times approaches like his have been tried? There's some argument for the Depression of 1920, but on the whole reduction in Government intervention during an economic downturn is just not how bureaucrats roll. So I count no attempts. To suggest there are no Hayekian successes because Hayek fails is simply deeply flawed thinking; there are no successes simply because those approaches have never been tried. I think the closest you can see are in certain emerging economies where, at first, no one cares to regulate because there is nothing of worth there from a political power point of view (e.g. early Hong Kong, much of the early U.S. even). And yes, I do consider the "Road to Serfdom" a good book :-)

astazangasta 11y ago
>but on the whole reduction in Government intervention during an economic downturn is just not how bureaucrats roll. We had this exact experiment after 2008. Austerity in Europe, stimulus in the US. The results are pretty clear.
- clock_tower 11y ago
  Both lose?
  - astazangasta 11y ago
    http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2013/03/us-vs-european-gdp.html http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2013/03/us-vs-european-gdp.htm...
    - clock_tower 11y ago
      I didn't know until I clicked it whether this was going to be a pro-Europe or a pro-America link. Austerity hasn't ended Europe's part of the Great Recession; but the US's "recovery" has only extended to a few privileged economic areas. In the South, the Midwest, and the interior of the coastal states, the Great Recession never ended.
      - astazangasta 11y ago
        The South never recovered from the Civil War, seems to me.
        clock_tower 11y ago
        What about the Midwest? The Northern and West Coast interior? Are they somehow suffering from the Civil War as opposed to the never-ended-in-real-terms 2008 recession?
- wycx 11y ago
  We didn't see the Europeans let the German banks fail.
caseysoftware 11y ago
"Global quality of life was greatly reduced" -> and that's for the people who survived. I think we have a handful of examples of Hayek's principles working out. JFK, Reagan, and even Bush 43 demonstrated that reducing taxes increases consumer spending across the entire system and improving the economy - less in the short term, more in the long term - and increasing government revenue at the same time al a the Laffer Curve.
- the_why_of_y 11y ago
  Bush 43, was that the one that presided over the inflating housing bubble that burst in 2007, as well as a ballooning federal debt? A Democrat had to clean up the mess, so I guess you could call it a long-term success. Notably the only US president since 1980 that achieved a balanced budget was Bill Clinton - unsurprisingly, he did so by raising taxes. https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FYFSGDA188S https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FYFSGDA188S By the way, did you know that Keynes wrote of the Laffer curve already in 1933? http://www.liberal-vision.org/2010/12/17/keynes-and-the-laffer-curve/ http://www.liberal-vision.org/2010/12/17/keynes-and-the-laff... Of course, the important question on which opinions differ is where is the peak of the curve. Given the data the US has collected over the last decade (see link above) it is immediately evident that current levels of taxation are to the left of the peak.

astazangasta 11y ago

>but on the whole reduction in Government intervention during an economic downturn is just not how bureaucrats roll. We had this exact experiment after 2008. Austerity in Europe, stimulus in the US. The results are pretty clear.

clock_tower 11y ago
Both lose?
- astazangasta 11y ago
  http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2013/03/us-vs-european-gdp.html http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2013/03/us-vs-european-gdp.htm...
  - clock_tower 11y ago
    I didn't know until I clicked it whether this was going to be a pro-Europe or a pro-America link. Austerity hasn't ended Europe's part of the Great Recession; but the US's "recovery" has only extended to a few privileged economic areas. In the South, the Midwest, and the interior of the coastal states, the Great Recession never ended.
    - astazangasta 11y ago
      The South never recovered from the Civil War, seems to me.
      - clock_tower 11y ago
        What about the Midwest? The Northern and West Coast interior? Are they somehow suffering from the Civil War as opposed to the never-ended-in-real-terms 2008 recession?
wycx 11y ago
We didn't see the Europeans let the German banks fail.

caseysoftware 11y ago

"Global quality of life was greatly reduced" -> and that's for the people who survived. I think we have a handful of examples of Hayek's principles working out. JFK, Reagan, and even Bush 43 demonstrated that reducing taxes increases consumer spending across the entire system and improving the economy - less in the short term, more in the long term - and increasing government revenue at the same time al a the Laffer Curve.

the_why_of_y 11y ago
Bush 43, was that the one that presided over the inflating housing bubble that burst in 2007, as well as a ballooning federal debt? A Democrat had to clean up the mess, so I guess you could call it a long-term success. Notably the only US president since 1980 that achieved a balanced budget was Bill Clinton - unsurprisingly, he did so by raising taxes. https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FYFSGDA188S https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FYFSGDA188S By the way, did you know that Keynes wrote of the Laffer curve already in 1933? http://www.liberal-vision.org/2010/12/17/keynes-and-the-laffer-curve/ http://www.liberal-vision.org/2010/12/17/keynes-and-the-laff... Of course, the important question on which opinions differ is where is the peak of the curve. Given the data the US has collected over the last decade (see link above) it is immediately evident that current levels of taxation are to the left of the peak.