Well, if that's true then Paul Krugman is not an economist. The instabilities in currency are due to these very same people who try to "control" the market inflating the currency beyond all reason.
AS to the instabilities in the market, they are due also to these peopel trying to control the economy.
There is no reason to believe that the free market needs to be smoothed out-- in fact the boom / bust cycle came from exactly this kind of central planning... before it, the economy was much smoother.
Once again, Government is a disease masquarading as its own cure.
But whats' amasing is the slave mentality you have-- you just assume that other people have the right to control your life. Why?
Even if these people had perfect information about the state of things at any given point, they would still fail because to do the job they are trying to do they'd have to have perfect vision of the future and the effects of the things they are considering.
History tells us that the only rational thing they can do is take ah ands off approach.
But that's not popular with fascists like yourself, is it?
Socialism, which is what you're advocating, works worse than everything else that's been tried. Monarchies are more efficient!
Impossible, because what you desire requires omniscience and the ability to see the future.
Is just the ludicrouse excuse of those who want to enslave everyone. Don't fall for such a patently obvious lie.
Yes, you are. That is exactly what you're arguing for. You just claim it isn't. Any economy which is controled by the government or any entity outside the owners of the companies in the economy is a centrally planned economy.
You have been reading a bunch of lies, and now you are repeating the m to me! Hell, you act as if korea were one country.
Now you're just flat out lying. I didn't say the economy doubled, I said the INCOME of the average person doubled.
A lie based on a lie. The poor have been doing better since Reagan. And it has generally done well in America, with the exception of the fact that the government takes half of everyone's income and essentially destroys it.
Hard to have the benefits of capitalism when the govenrment destroys half the value.
Or, put another way, since 1913 this countryh as been increasingly a socialists country.
And yet their economies are growing much slower.
Again, by definition you tell a lie-- you don't know what I was taught in primary school or how long ago it was.
If you line up companies in a row based on the standard of living of the poorest 10% of the country, you'll find that the more socialist they are, the lower the poors standard of living, and the more capitalist, the higher.
The most recent Nobel Prize in Economics went to a couple of guys who actually looked at how markets worked, as as opposed to assuming that they work perfectly. If you want to include them in the catagory of "free marketer" along with Milton Friedman, your credibility goes down the tubes.
Come on, produce the historical example of a market where monetarist economics could actually predict what was going to happen. You shouldn't have to go back for more than a few hundred years.
Letting them loose on more or less modern industrial societies is irresponsible. I'm painfully aware what Thatcher' irrational enthusiasm for monetarism cost the British economy - I was there all the way through it.
They functioned as the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse in Chile - after the U.S. had engineered the over-throw and assassination of the democratically elected President Allende, they sent in monetarist economists to grind the faces of the poor who had elected him. It cost the fat cat collaborators in terms of the speed of economic recovery, but it did suit their ideological prejudices.
They made a total mess of the economic reorganisation of East Europe and Russia after the fall of communism. The bizarre idea that waving the free-market magic wand over a bunch of ageing and under-capitalised factories could bring them up to western standards "in a single bound" worked exactly as well as any sensible person would expect - most of the factories were shut down, the employees became un-employed and the organisations became worthless.
In some exceptional cases, the factories were up-graded with western capital, which allowed them to continue to exploit the expertise of the workers, and of the existing distribution networks, effectively salvaging most of the intellectual capital which had been built up in these organisations.
If the monetarist economists hadn't been so ridiculously intellectually lazy, they would have proposed a phased introduction of the free market, behind the sort of tariff barriers the U.S.used to protect its early industrialisation in the nineteenth century, (and which Japan, Korea and China have used with considerable success since then) which would have given many more factories the chance to up-grade to meet the standards of the western free market.
Currency speculators and the managers of hedge funds?
If you say so. Where is your evidence?
And the Great Depression of the early 1930's never happened. It wasn't the first of it's kind, but it was a good deal more dramatic than its predecessors.
Right wing clap-trap.
The choice is between a local protection racket and a democratically elected representative government. I prefer the lesser of the two evils.
The more-or-less free market system works reasonably well with very imperfect information. A system that used a greater proportion of the data that is now collected should be able to work better. Designing such a system would be non-trivial.
History tells you that - but you don't know enough history to be aware of the 1929 stock market crash and the subsequent depression. Those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it.
You will have to look fairly hard to find a fascist like me. The only extant examples speak Italian, which I don't, and have the same sort of comical political ideas as you do, which I don't share. The current premier of Italy does seem to have neo-facist colleagues, but the man himself appears to be just one more megalomaniac bribe-giving capitalist.
I follow Keynes in the opinion that the free-market economy is inherently unstable, and observe that his preferred system of damping these instabilities via the central banks did seem to work. This strikes me as a reasonably hands-off control - there is no specific manipulation of the prices of individual commodities. Despite your ideologically based prejudices, this is not a facist position, and nobody with any grasp of reality would think it was.
You seem to have this binary picture of the world - everything that isn't free-market capitalism is socialism and thus bad.
In fact there are lots of versions of modified free-market capitalism, almost all of which work better than the totally hands-off scheme that gave us the great depression, and there are a whole bunch of systems of cooperation, some of them described - very misleadingly - as anarchism, which might just work better than our current system, granting really good information systems.
The current modified free-market systems work reasonably well without these advantages, and with only a restricted set of the information that is now available within commercial organisations. Try and get your head around this point - it one that I have been trying to get over to you for some time now, but it looks as if you are a little too preprogrammed to be able to accomodate the concept.
Er. Who wants to enslave everybody? How does setting up a more flexible and more nearly optimal economic system make everybody slaves? Who is producing patently ludicrous lies?
failed,
Then you too live in a centrally planned economy, and all we are arguing about is which centrally planned economy is least worst.
In fact I'm interested in decentrallised control mechanisms, analogous the the decentrallised access control of the original Ethernet protocol. What little I know about the "anarchist" social philosophy suggests that this is their kind of thing.
South Korea is one country. North Korea hasn't got an economy worthy of the name. I've worked for companies that sold equipment to South Korea, and we always understood South Korea when anybody spoke of Korea - only the diplomats and the military have to pay any atention to North Korea.
I didn't say anything about the economy doubling, I just said that the growth rate (by implication in average income) was respectable, but about half than that achieved by Japan, (South) Korea and China, when their economies were catching up.
So where is this "flat out lie"? Find your own numbers via google as I did if you think I'm making a false claim.
And your counter-evidence is? I was directly quoting Paul Krugman, but I've seen similar figures in Scientific American. Who is your authority. Bob Jones?
According to?
Since it spends large chunk of the tax income on a fatuously oversized military machine, this is a difficult proposition to entirely disagree with. But some of the money spent on the military is justifiable - you need defence forces, as well as police forces, diplomatic services, highways, air-traffic control, the FDA, the NBS and a whole long list of services which depend on your tax dollars.
The right wing enthusiasm for privatisation ignores (as usual) the lessons of history. In the U.K. Thatcher privatised a whole lot of stuff which had started off as private companies in Victorian times and been taken over by the municipalities and later the central government because the commercial services didn't work very well. And -guess what - they don't work very well now that they have been re-privatised a hundred years later. The railways are a particularly salient case in point.
But you've done very well, even so.
At which particular instant? Name your date and the corresponding growth figures.
I don't know when you were in primary school, but you can't have got the over-simplified clap-trap that you peddle any later in your academic career, and what you peddle is clearly way past its sell-by date.
I don't think that what I wrote can be characterised as a lie. You do tend to to mis-parse sentences and describe your misintepretation as a lie, which is not a nice way to behave.
That is an opinion, jack, unsupported by any facts. Go find some. You'll misinterpret them, and I'll have a great deal of fun revealing your intellectual inadequacies. You still do better than Precious Pup, but you could with more factual knowledge.
We aren't talking about a single Nobel here. We are, at a minimum, talking about Friedman on one occasion, James Buchanan on another, Vernon Smith on another, and George Stigler on another. You are dealing with counter arguments to Keynes from at least three schools these days; the monetarists, the public choice theorists, and the Austrian inclined neo-classicists.
I'd be content to put Friedman's historical record of prediction in competition with Galbraith's. There is a reason the whole enterprize is known as the dismal science - predictive power isn't its strong suit. The difference between the view holders is that one group acknowledges their inability to predict, much less control, an entity as complex as a modern economy. The other group is in denial.
You mean like Argentina? That part of Keynes has always struck me as lunatic. His notion that 'in the long run, we're all dead anyway' is the only possible justification for devaluing your currency to give people more money to spend. It violates the first law of free lunches, which is that they ain't free.
No argument from me on that one. I'll one up you. The farm subsidies are even worse than the steel tariffs, and both policies utterly ignore Ricardo's lessons. Bush was stupid for signing both bills, and I wrote to tell him so. Of course, we have a long way to go before we can compare with EU style farm subsidies.
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Yes, that's right. Each cow in Europe gets a subsidy of some US$2.20 per day, which doesn't even begin to cut into the greatest trade barrier ever erected - the labeling of GM food (and that only becuase they couldn't maintain an outright ban).
Our level of military spending and global military involvement are higher than I would prefer, as well. It would help if Europe could pull anything remotely approaching their own weight militarily speaking.
On the other hand, the current US administration is not speding on tanks for Keynesian reasons.
Yes, yes; and Keynes and Galbraith tell the story you want to hear. The news of the day is that no economist is in charge of the economy. Thatcher's weren't and Blair's aren't.
Agreed.
And to heck with the consequences of unstable currency and all of the other unintended joy that goes along with dumping devalued cash on people's heads.
No. Monetarists don't believe that when you attempt to modify investor expectations that you are doing what you think you are doing, and certainly not ONLY what you think you are doing.
You don't want a group of central bankers attempting to run the whole economy. They don't know what demand is supposed to be for zucchini, so they don't need to be manipulating demand up or down.
Commodities should all be handled like OPEC? Should all commodities cheat on the deal like OPEC members do, which is the only reason supply is even approximated by price at the pump?
interference--> > > > > they have doubled the incomes, on average, of a billion people.
Like in Japan? Most of those folks haven't figured out how to put on their 'big boy pants' yet, and they have to run to mommy to save them from anything that looks like a competitive threat.
Why the arbitrary line? Shouldn't each locality institute protectionist measures to save their local businesses from having to compete with the town on the other side of the hill?
If only someone had protected vacuum tube manufacturers, the world would be a better place.
US companies are robust to the extent that they have a history of having to compete. They are uncompetitive to the extent that they have been protected.
Have you taken a look at their economy in the last decade?
My observation was that a single Keynesian journalist (with good contacts in the academic community), predicting for the fun of it, did a whole lot better than a Treasury-full of monetarist economists who were being paid and supported as if the U.K. economy depended on their expertise.
So why don't they go off and do something useful -like digging ditches
- rather than posing as advisors to the Republican Party.
The Keynesians did pretty well at controlling the world economy through the years after WWII, but they failed to play to the prejudices of the rich, so now they are denied access to the levers of power, which are now in the hands of crew that you claim to admit their inability to predict, let alone control, the system for which they are responsible.
No, I don't mean like Argentina, or like Germany in 1924 - I mean like most of Western Europe and the U.S. during the 1950's and 1960's.
An irrational prejudice you share with a lot monetarist economists. It is on a par with Einstein's dislike of statistical mechanics "because God doesn't play dice".
As Krugman points out, the free lunch in this case is the under-utilised plant that sits idle during a recession and can be tricked into production by a little judicious pump-priming.
The U.S. has it's own farm subsidies, and makes it very difficult for Australian beef producers to sell their product into the American market; they send out inspectors to make sure that the Australian slaugher-houses conform to every last letter of the (ever-changing) U.S. regulations, and the slaughter houses end up having to be rebuilt every year of so.
Australian agriculture is a good deal more efficient than U.S. agriculture - because it started later (the Australian rural population peaked in the 1890's and has been declining every since) - and both are more efficient than the much older European agricultural system, but the EC subsidies are being scaled back over the years - for one thing, they can't afford to subsidise the Polish and other easter European peasants when the eastern european countries become full members of the community - and large chunks of rural France are being depopulated as inefficient producers are moved off the land, or at least retire due to old age.
No, they are repaying the financial support they got during the last election. It is called pork-barrel politics in the U.S., and corruption in other countries.
Thatcher's weren't, because because they didn't know what effects they were going to have. Blair's aren't because Gordon Brown is in charge of the U.K. economy, and it is his advisors who call the tune. They aren't doing badly, as far as I can see from the Netherlands.
As opposed to the natural instabilities of the market that gave us the Great Depression. Try to get it into your head that deflation is just as serious a problem as inflation, as the Japanese have been proving for some time now.
Hyper-inflation is another, and even more serious can of worms, but judicious pump-priming does not lead to hyper-inflation.
Because they believe in the perfection of the market. The perfect market is a gorgeously simple model and give lovely predictions, which don't have much to do with reality. The Keynesians are stuck with a much less tractable model, but it is a lot more realistic.
So fire them and hire a bunch of central bankers who can work work out when there is too much consumer demand, and when there is too little. Every economic journalist seems to be able to work out that little sum, so there would seem to be a decent pool of potential candidates. The banking community would have convulsions, not before time.
I was in vague contact with them at one point in my career, when I was involved in a discussion about encrypted data transfer across packet-switched networks, and the message I got was that the bankers were the most complacent and inward-looking bunch of navel-gazers you could hope to find.
At that point nobody had tapped their unencoded transmissions along their leased telephone pairs, and they couldn't see why they should anticipate such an event.
They don't cheat on a dramatic scale, and the system works reasonably well; the price of oil is creeping up steadily as the amount left in the ground creeps down, and it looks as if the Athabaska tar sands will start coming on line any time now without driving the market price down to the point where it isn't worth working those deposits.
Beats the hell out of the oil-prce crises we had when I was young,when the wordl economy would go into recession while it coped with a doubling of the price of oil.
Which industries and which firms are you talking about? When I worked for Cambridge Instruments on electron microscopes, the Japanese manufacturer JOEL was number one in the world, and Hitachi was number three, and both were damn good - much better than the crappy U.S. firm who were number two due to the grip they had on the parochial U.S. market. Cambridge Instruments were number four, and we sold half our output into the U.S.
Economies of scale. A manufacturer selling to a whole country can decisively under-cut a manufacturer who is only tooled up to supply a single town.
In a highly urbanised country like Australia, where Sydney and Melbourne account for about a third of the population this leads to a fairly silly concentration of production into one or other of the two major cities.
By the same token, Australia (and the Netherlands) should be able to get all their manufacturered goods for half the price by importing them from the U.S.A., where the domestic market is ten times larger, leaving both countries without any manufacturing industry at all.
The aim is to build up some local industry to the level where it can tool up to produce in volumes appropriate to the world market, and this pretty much requires either subsidy or protection behind tariff barriers
IIRR there are now more vacuum tubes manufactured than when vacuum tubes were the only active devices. This may include cathode ray tubes.
Being protected doesn't necessarily make them uncompetitive - the U.S.domestic market is quite large enough to support manufacture on a scale which allows them to compete on the world market.
Protection can allow an uncompetitive firm to survive, but it doesn't stop a firm from tooling up to compete on the international market.
Sure. They need some Keynsian liquidity injection to get their domestic market consuming again. The problem doesn't seem to have anything to do with the protection of the domestic market; the Japanese consumer just isn't buying anything worth a damn.
------------- Do you know nothing other than to invent scurrilous trash???
-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
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You're talkign about the CATO fellows? If you think CATO fellows are anti-free market, your credibility... doesn't change.
The US and Europe for the last 100 years. Austrian economics (and its predecesors) has had it pegged
England is a socialist system, not a capitalist one. That she was unable to achieve captitalism does not undermine the improvements she's made. Note that her opposition to the EU was based on her prediction that they would become a central government of europe and deprive all europeans of basic human rights. And here it is, years later, and they are about to pass a constitution that does exactly that!
UH, the Chilean economy finally came out of the doldrums after the Chicago 8 went there and is still going strong, you idiot.
Furthermore, Allende had suspended the constitution, and thus the "Democratically elected" bit is pure bullshit.
But then, you have never been one for caring for history.
Oh, and the poor people in Chile? They are big fans of capitalism. Everywhere you go they are selling cigarrettes, or gum, or bottles of coke, and other stuff. You couldnt' do that here, without permits from a half dozen agencies, and not at all if you're under 18. I bought a couple packs of Chilean cigarrettes from 15 or 16 year olds while I was there. I'm sure you're going to tell me I ruined their lives, eh?
Pinochet was a dictator, but he was a better dictator than the one he replaced. At least Chile didn't have the mass slaughters and mass graves that socialists like yourself have wrought everywhere else they have come to power... like nicaragua, cuba, china, ussr, korea, etc. etc.
You think you can just make shit up about history and not be called on it? When was the last time YOU were in Chile, by the way?
Uh, no. The russians did that. The idea that former USSR states are capitalist is absurd.
They were already worthless. Capitalism is no magic, despite your insistance that it must be in order to not be a fraud. Capitalism works, always, but it must be tried. When you do not remove the impediments to free trade and human rights, you do not have capitalism.
All those states are kleptocracies and they will continue to do poorly. they are great examples of the failure of your ideology, not mine.
I have the greatest success in history on my side- India. Of course ,there's also the first 100 years of the USA.
Yeah, if they are shut tdown the workers are laid off and thats bad. If they are upgraded then the workers are exploited, and that's bad too!
You're contradicting yourself.
You need to stop regurgitating propaganda you've swallowed and start thinking for yourself. You're repeating yourself and not making much sense, either.
Lets see, in 1913 the Federal Reserve-- the nations third Central Bank-- was formed, and in 1929 we had the greatest stock crash ever.
The first two central banks failed much quicker... but the fed is still around destroying our economy.
Yes, and it came about 16 years after the formation of the Federal Reserve.
The Fed, remember, was supposed to save us from things like the stock crash of 1929 and the depression that followed.
Government never does a good job at anything-- after all, the worse things get the more it can put the squeeze on people for more money.
Thus, government is a disease masquarading as its own cure.
Can you name a single important social problem that the US government has solved? (Things solved by private companies do not count.)
No, you choose evil over good.
Where by non-trivial you mean impossible, yes. Centralized planning never works. The free market workse fairly well. But any alternative
--- one that necessarily removes FREEDOM-- will suffer from inefficiencies as people rebel against having their FREEDOM taken away.
You are an idiot. But you force me to ammend my statements-- those who know and COMPREHEND history recognize that the only rational approach is the free market in specific, and freedom in general.
The alternative-- your alternative-- is always fascism in one form or another.
All of them are like you. All fascists have a single identical characteristic-- opposition to human rights.
You want to enslave and starve the world, you want to take away human rights. you are advocating the policies previous fascists have put into effect.
The word fits.
Yeah, by your standards the Great Depression was a success!
There is letting people live and there is killing them. That's my binary view of hte world. I recognize that some people just try to injure people instead of kill them ouright... but I don't cut a lot of slack for those types.
That you must lie about history shows you know your position to be a fraudulent one. (or you are too ignorant to waste time arguing with.)
There would be no government in anarchism. Thus there would be no central control over the economy. Thus you would have a totally free market economy.
You are, and you do. You want to force everyone to live as you see fit-- to get paid what YOU think they should get paid-- lest they be exploited. etc.
You don't like the repercussions of what you advocate, stop advocating it.
You mean, only one good can be traded at a time, and the whole economy shuts down to wait for it to finish trading? That's a pretty stupid protocol.
Once again, I am reminded that you have no clue what you're talking about/
Again, you don't seem to comprehend the definition of anarchism. Without government, who would insure the employees weren't "exploited"???
And yet, as a command control economy, its the epitome of your ideology.
A claim you keep making, but you have never bothered to back up. Admit it, you're lying. (Or put up the numbers. Mine can be had at the indian governments website.)
Yet you didn't post them. Curious.
Ah, so you were plagerizing a lie! Do you know about the logical fallacy of argument from authority?
Gee, could it be that they are saddled with too much regultion? No! It must be because they are private!
How is it that you are always able to get food, if private industry is so incompetant?
Yet every service provided by government is poorly delivered and costs far too much.
On the contrary, you just make shit up and expect us to believe it. Either that or you're getting it out of a book from a guy who made shit up.
Since you have repeatedly made grosse errors of fact-- statmeents about Chile, about the Great Depression, etc, and have failed to make an arugment other than strining along a lot of pointles insults, I'm starting to conclude that you are nothing but a troll.
IT is time for you to put up, and start citing some real facts. Notice your idiot author does not back up his claims. Gee, I wonder why that is?
--------------------- It's more likely wealth which is the pretender in this regard.
--------------------- Since they don't exist. Govt has had NO chance to "fix" anything, since it is not given free-reign to do so, it is always sabotaged by the rich trying to get their taxes back with political dishonesty.
-------------------------- Because they do! They have the power, and that GIVES them the right! All the good people do YOU by that power you selectively ignore! But you would have NOTHING you could hold onto without others choosing to defend your wealth. Property and rights are ENTIRELY DERIVED from Democracy! They owe it their total fealty and self-moderation thereof.
------------------------- No, YOU do.
---------------------------- You have NOT shown this, you PERHAPS have shown that centralized stealing from the people by the rich demoralizes them and collapses their economy sooner or later, but that's all, and you won't LIKE that! But an end to all centralized stealing would be the end of capitalism/feudalism and the beginning of a golden age!
--------------------------- Nonsense, it STEALS fairly well. It neither "works" in the sense of benefitting any but the rich, nor does it do this efficiently. If it were to operate efficiently it would have to do so consciously instead of by unconscious blind greed. It would have to submit public policy regarding the division of wealth to Democratic control, and accept common I.T. means of data gathering to determine what PEOPLE want, insteasd of trying to tell THEM what they want!
---------------------------- You have no "freedom". You have no freedom of speech unless we want to hear you, because if you show up and harangue us you'll be arrested for peace-disturbance, if you chase us around bothering us we have you arrested for harrassment, the only place you can speak your mind is either at home, alone, or only where some of US WANT to HEAR YOU!
You have no freedom of religion if you annoy us with your crap, and if you decide your religion tells you to do things we regard as abusive we put your ass in prison, so you have no real freedom anyway, it's all a sham!
What you DO have is the freedom to be like the rest of us, and to seek enjoyment as we do! But that's because we GIVE that to you!!
------------------- Your knowledge of history is twisted!
------------------------- Nonsense, your theft IS the ONLY fascism!
----------------------------- Do blather on!
----------------- Nope, that is, obviously, what Capitalism wants, WE are the Cure!! Steve
------------- Which you clearly didn't, YOU'RE the one who's full of shit!
-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
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------------ None of this falderal is even necesary in an economy where you do NOT lend money and you do NOT try to moronically intermix "capital" control of production tokens with labor-exchange vouchers. There are NO cycles of control required, and no interest rates to manipulate.
Labor is paid by "labor-hours" on personalized computer record, which permits people to buy goods made by that same labor in govt stores. The only way to obtain goods other than necessary commodities is to order them, thereby promising at that time to work sufficient additional labor-hours to manufacture them.
"Capital" is the control of prices and extra labor for speculative public ventures by the Dmeocratic Majority, and allocates labor and public stores of materiale to the task, and sets the prices at an additional fraction over their cost in labor hours so that they can pay for public works.
In case no one notes what this actually is, it is the method used for thousands of years to run huge family farms that have fed all of western cvilization all along.
This system would totally end cyclic and unpredictable unstable capitalist economics. Not because it is so bright and well-thought out, but simply because it gets rid of the problem, the best of ALL solutions to ANY problem!!
By comparison current capitalist thrashing about with their economy is ludicrous and laughable.
-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
http://www.armory.com/~rstevew or http://www.armory.com/~rstevew/Public
----------------- No, you know a limited amount about capitalist economy that you learned in your successful highschool brainwashing.
-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
http://www.armory.com/~rstevew or http://www.armory.com/~rstevew/Public
--------------------- You're at your most pitiful when you posture instead of postulate. How's that for alliteration, Spiro??
-Steve
--
-Steve Walz rstevew@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew
Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!
http://www.armory.com/~rstevew or http://www.armory.com/~rstevew/Public
Stalin was not known for his grasp of economic theory.
Keynes was not trail-breaker that Marx was, but both are giants in economics.
The only biographies I've read of Keynes don't suggest any death-bed conversions to monetarism. There are reports that he was none too impressed by what was being done in his name, and that he would have preferred to see the central bankers doing more of the manipulation of investor expectations, but this falls a long way short of any recantation.
The monetarists don't like him, because his work shows why their lovely tractable models of the economy don't model the real economy. Keynes pointed out the participants in real markets don't have perfect information, and can (and do) take their money out of the market if they think that the price of the goods they want are declining (as subject on which they can't have perfect information).
If economics were a science, the monetarists would be the capitalist equivalents of Lysenko, obviously ridiculous in their attempts to peddle a bogus economic theory that fitted the prejudices of the Republican Party.
The Laffer Curve did actually get ridiculed, eventually
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so I suppose there is some small hope for economics in the long run..
Yes, a trait he shared with Keynes. Or, more precisely, Keynes had lots of theories that he grasped well, but none of them fit reality, the facts, nor worked in practice.
That's not surprising. Ideological socialists tend to stay that way-- after you've spent twenty years or so ignoring reality and continuing to believe in fantasies in the face of said fantasies failing repeatedly around you... who can expect you to wise up. I guess its just easier to cling to the fantasy world.
Once again, you ignore objective reality and further these fantasies. The free market models work exactly, it is Keynes who has been completely discredit.
Every honest economist out there acknowledges this, even the socialist ones.... they're busy trying to come up with post-keynes and post-marx socialism for this very reason.
On the contrary-- Keynes insists that the government has perfect information and that individuals understanding is irrelevant. That individuals don't have perfect information is a free market idea. Only the free market cares what individuals decide to do!
The idea that individuals need perfect information in a free market is one of the most threadbare fallacies you guys put forth... and nobody with a basic education in economics is going to fall for it-- the free market works fine BECAUSE people don't have all the info. That's the point of having a free market. If people had perfect information, tehn your planned economy fascism might actually work!
Yawn.
There is a lot of hope-- every year or so another free marketer wins the nobel prize in economics... and while the politicians are still infatuated with socialism, the economists are quickly comming around. Nobody puts forth keynsian economics these days and gets much respect.
You have to go to usenet to see people doing so with a straight face!
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