Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Stiglitz: Keynes Saved Capitalism from the Capitalists

Joseph Stiglitz, writes:
The way I see it is a little bit like the way I see Keynes. He was trying to save capitalism from the capitalists. Had Keynesian economics not succeeded in showing that you could restore near-full employment, the attacks on capitalism would have been virulent. Had the so-called “capitalists” had their way and engaged in budget cutting, there would be no capitalism.
I find it hard to believe Stiglitz is serious with this comment. Keynes was all about promoting government intervention in the economy. Keynes wasn't about saving capitalism, he was about expanding the state at the expense of free markets.

Stiglitz will say anything to promote the advancement of the globalist themes. War to bring about peace. Intervention to protect free markets.

5 comments:

  1. Having just passed through an economics program dominated by leftists, I can attest that Stiglitz's view is widespread among academics. A few of the self-described Marxist professors even somewhat dislike Keynes because he allegedly "saved capitalism."

    So Stiglitz may not be as disingenuous as one would suspect. He may actually believe it. These people live in their own fantasies.

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  2. "Had Keynesian economics not succeeded in showing that you could restore near-full employment"

    When did it succeed in showing this? Every single instance of real life attempts have been abject failures. This is just another thing which separates physics from economics. Physicists would have dropped such a theory long ago, given its horrible track record.

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  3. "So Stiglitz may not be as disingenuous as one would suspect. He may actually believe it. These people live in their own fantasies."

    Supporting capitalism will never win you any friends, power or influence in any area of government or academia. Why is anyone surprised then, when brilliant people like Stiglitz attack it and otherwise rational people argue against it?

    Because human beings tend to like gaining friends, power and influence w/out producing or achieving anything. Supporting capitalism and individual liberty is a thankless, selfless undertaking and I am grateful to everyone reading and supporting this blog for fighting back against the U.S.' march to statism.

    We have the ideas, the theory and therefore the facts on our side. Keep fighting!

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  4. In a perverse way Stiglitz may be right, but not in the way he thinks. He assumes that Keynes corrected bad economic thinking, which he didn’t. But Marxism was extremely popular in the 1930’s. Look at the ease with which FDR transformed the US into a virtual clone of the USSR. Most Americans thought the Soviets had the better economic system and that the US could do nothing but imitate the USSR as closely as possible without adopting a dictatorship. Classical liberalism was almost dead.

    Keynes’s economics was to a large degree a compromise between Marxism and classical liberalism that allowed the US to justify a tiny free market in the face of nearly monolithic support for Marxism.

    Of course by “saving” capitalism Keynes gave away most of the store and left us with a “capitalism” that looked very much like Marxism. But in the atmosphere of the 30’s and 40’s maybe nothing else was possible.

    As I learn more history I’m increasingly impressed with how Marxist the US had become by the 1930’s. And look at Eisenhower’s federal highway system in the 50’s. What was that other than an attempt to imitate the USSR? Even Samuelson taught that the USSR would overtake the US economically. Most Americans had the idea that the Soviets had the better economic system, but we were too much in love with democracy to abandon it for dictatorship. Americans fought against the totalitarianism of the USSR, not the economics. Kennedy’s space program was a blatant attempt to imitate the USSR. The CIA over estimated Soviet gdp by a factor of 10.

    Only since the collapse of the USSR have most conservatives begun to realize that their economics was wrong. Libertarians always knew they were wrong, but most conservatives didn’t.

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  5. True words from Anon: "Supporting capitalism and individual liberty is a thankless, selfless undertaking and I am grateful to everyone reading and supporting this blog for fighting back against the U.S.' march to statism"...thank you!

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