John Maynard Keynes, Defunct Economist

John Maynard Keynes, who rose to prominence in the 1930s, wrote, “The ideas of economists and political philosophers ... are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men ... are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority ... are usually distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

When Keynes burst on the scene, most economists were against government economic interventionism. Still, there was a growing influence of Marxist ideas, evidenced by the inroads of welfarism in Europe, especially in Great Britain and Germany. And favorable reports of “success” in Mussolini’s Italy and Stalin’s Russia influenced the political direction of the United States...

Keynes was a revolutionary who provided a rationale for intellectual and political leaders who were increasingly enamored with Marxist political objectives but somewhat constrained by conventional economic wisdom...

Keynes’s theories provided intellectual support for the economic policies of Franklin Roosevelt, which were welcomed by a public desperate for change in the dire circumstances following the crash in 1929. They provided cover for massive government spending, abandoning the gold standard, and political control of market functions — all contrary to the economic wisdom that had taken two centuries to develop and had led to unparalleled prosperity in the United States.

The great economists of the 20th century, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt, and Murray Rothbard, all clearly and thoroughly discredited Keynes. Hayek and Friedman both won Nobel Prizes in economics. In 1931 Hayek challenged Keynes in a famous series of debates, which focused on Keynes’s Treatise on Money. In the decades since, history has proven the correctness of Hayek’s views. Roosevelt’s New Deal was a failure and prolonged the Depression by about six years, as various research studies have shown. And though popular for several decades, Keynes eventually fell out of favor. Until now, when he is the “defunct economist” who provides the intellectual cover for Obama, just as he did for Roosevelt...

read the entire essay