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> To be able to put ink onto a piece of paper and have every other human on the planet willing to work for that paper: It is immense power, immense control & it
by dmfdmf 13y ago
> To be able to put ink onto a piece of paper and have every other human on the planet willing to work for that paper: It is immense power, immense control & it is being abused.
I would argue that giving politicians and the banks access to that power was the point of Keynesian economics, i.e. it is a rationalization for Socialism.
At its root, Keynesian economics rests on an equivocation on the meaning of "price" and "wage" and a misrepresentation of Say's Law. In his book "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money", Keynes argues that "Supply creates its own Demand" is false but this is a bad formulation of Say's Law which Keynes did not refute. The proper formulation of Say's Law is "Supply IS Demand" and that is not open to dispute even under a barter economy. In more advanced monetary and credit-money economies Supply and Demand can become disconnected and diverge (for various complicated reasons) which is a bad thing and why we need a science of Economics to design a banking system that prevents it. Unfortunately today, thanks to Keynes, we have institutionalized the divergence of Supply and Demand (i.e. fiat money and the ability to create Demand out of thin air, which I consider a type of fraud).
You can prove this to yourself by reading two books. First, read Henry Hazlitt's "The Failure of the 'New Economics': An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies". In this book, Hazlitt logically shreds Keynesian arguments step by step and was promptly ignored because people wanted Socialism and/or the power to manipulate the monetary system. Keynes provided the intellectual rationalization to Socialize the banking system. Second, get it straight from the horse's mouth, read Keynes' work "The General Theory..." but wherever Keynes writes "wage" cross it out and write "price" and you will quickly see that his work amounts to a repudiation of the principle of Supply and Demand which is one of the cornerstones of Economics. Also, read up on what Say's Law really means and see if that is what Keynes refuted.
The title of the linked article should be "Keynesian Economics is Dead!, Long Live Keynesian Economics!" because this is a moral issue not an economic issue. As long as people want Socialism they will continue to advocate variants of Keynesian economics, even if they don't call it that. Unfortunately, giving the current primitive understanding of economics this is not going to end well.