Patrick Barron–My letter to the NY Times re: Typical Keynesian Whitewash
Dear Sirs:
Fareed Zakaria’s review of the Adam Tooze book Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World is a typical Keynesian whitewash of a deeply flawed monetary and regulatory system. Like Tooze, Zakaria sees the Federal Reserve Bank as the hero in “saving the financial system” that was going into free fall in 2008. But why was it going into free fall, and was the Fed’s massive, multi-trillion dollar bailout really the answer? To agree with Tooze and Zakaria is to condone monetary counterfeiting pre-2008 and even more monetary counterfeiting thereafter. One of the prime purposes of sound, as opposed to fiat, money is to allocate scarce resources. The Keynesians do not admit that resources are scarce. They equate the medium of exchange, in this case fiat dollars, with real capital. Yes, fiat dollars can be increased to unlimited amounts at the click of a Federal Reserve Bank computer, but real resources and real capital must be accumulated by hard-working people. Zakaria and Tooze–and the rest of the Keynesian dominated Main Stream Media like the New York Times–fail spectacularly to understand the distinction.
