March 1, 2009

Keynes

Much has been made of the "death of the free market" and subsequent resurrection of economists such as Keynes and Tobin, from Bloomberg
After a three-decade run, the free-market philosophies of Friedman that shaped U.S. policy are being eclipsed by the pro- government ideas of Tobin, the late Yale economist and Nobel laureate who brought John Maynard Keynes into the modern era.

Keynes was a prolific writer (so prolific that some find that he agreed with everyone) therefore it is useful to look at the 1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money and in particular the German preface;
the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of the production and distribution of a given output produced under conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.