Buchanan on Keynesianism

Folly is defined as (1) lack of good sense or of normal prudence, (2) inability or refusal to accept existing reality or to foresee inevitable consequences. Both of these definitions convey something of the policy stance that I associate with the term Keynesian.

Jim Buchanan‘s 1987 essay “Keynesian Follies,” reprinted in Vol. 1 of Jim’s Collected Works (pp. 164-178):

James Buchanan on the Minimum Wage

"The inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price is the core proposition in economic science, which embodies the presupposition that human choice behavior is sufficiently rational to allow predictions to be made. Just as no physicist would claim that "water runs uphill," no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores."

~James M. Buchanan, 1986 Nobel laureate in economics, writing in the Wall Street Journal on April 25, 1996