{"id":18096,"date":"2016-02-22T16:31:25","date_gmt":"2016-02-22T21:31:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=18096"},"modified":"2016-02-22T16:31:25","modified_gmt":"2016-02-22T21:31:25","slug":"the-follies-and-fallacies-of-keynesian-economics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=18096","title":{"rendered":"The Follies and Fallacies of Keynesian Economics"},"content":{"rendered":"
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THE FOLLIES AND FALLACIES OF KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
Eighty years go, on February 4, 1936, one of the most influential books of the last one hundred years was published, British economist, John Maynard Keynes\u2019s\u00a0The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money<\/em>. With it was born what has become known as Keynesian Economics.<\/div>\n
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Within less than a decade after its appearance, the ideas in\u00a0The General Theory<\/em>\u00a0had practically conquered the economics profession and become a guidebook for government economic policy. Few books, in so short a time, have gained such wide influence and generated so destructive an impact on public policy. What Keynes succeeded in doing was to provide a rationale for what governments always like to do: spend other people\u2019s money and pander to special interests.<\/p>\n

In the process Keynes helped undermine what had been three of the essential institutional ingredients of a free-market economy: the gold standard, balanced government budgets, and open competitive markets. In their place Keynes\u2019s legacy has given us paper-money inflation, government deficit spending, and more political intervention throughout the market.<\/p>\n

It would, of course, be an exaggeration to claim that without Keynes and the Keynesian Revolution inflation, deficit spending, and interventionism would not have occurred. For decades before the appearance of Keynes\u2019s book, the political and ideological climate had been shifting toward ever-greater government involvement in social and economic affairs, due to the growing influence of collectivist ideas among intellectuals and policy-makers in Europe and America.<\/p>\n

\"Keynes<\/p>\n

Before Keynes: Wise Free Market Policies<\/strong><\/p>\n

But before the appearance of\u00a0The General Theory<\/em>, many of the advocates of such collectivist policies had to get around the main body of economic thinking which still argued that, in general, the best course was for government to keep its hands off the market, maintain a stable currency backed by gold, and restrain its own taxing and spending policies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE FOLLIES AND FALLACIES OF KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS Eighty years go, on February 4, 1936, one of the most influential books of the last one hundred years was published, British economist, John Maynard Keynes\u2019s\u00a0The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. With it was born what has become known as Keynesian Economics. Within less than a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[7380,951,3575,2128,374,426,458,467,1100,12541,783,12540],"class_list":["post-18096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-cobden-centre","tag-currency","tag-deficit-spending","tag-free-market","tag-gold","tag-inflation","tag-john-maynard-keynes","tag-keynesian-economics","tag-paper-money","tag-political-intervention","tag-taxes","tag-the-general-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18096"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18097,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18096\/revisions\/18097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}