So long and good riddance to Keynesian economic theory?
While the rest of hyperconnected, interweb-powered planet Earth has now seen Keynesian economic intervention tested in real time and discredited beyond any intelligent doubt, the Times, I quickly learned, is a walled garden where the ideas of John Maynard Keynes remain not only viable but so evidently true as to require no factual support.
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You may know Keynes as the brilliant mid-20th century economist whose general theory of employment was said to have undergone a revival in 2008, though in fact it had never gone away. You won't know Keynes very well from reading the Times, but only in the sense that you won't know Christianity very well if you never meet any non-Christians. Economic intervention is the air the Grey Lady breathes. In the opinion pages of the edition I looked at, perennially perturbed Nobel laureate Paul Krugman decries the “so-called urgent need to reduce deficits” and asserts without documentation that a “real response” to the global correction must involve precisely the medicine that has so far proven ineffective: stimulus for infrastructure and government schools, taxpayer-funded payoffs for mortgage deadbeats, and an “all-out effort” by the wildly popular Federal Reserve.
With European economies collapsing and America's credit rating downgraded, you'd think even the most committed government-intervention advocates would be slightly embarrassed to keep pushing the idea. But President Obama is a true believer, and there are plenty of people like Krugman to keep cheerleading it.
Just consider this lead essay in the most recent Newsweek by a movie director and former Obama supporter who chastises the president as an appeaser on the order of Neville Chamberlain dealing with the Nazis because he let the vicious, heartless Republicans intimidate him into not doing enough:
Chamberlain had a weak hand and played it poorly. Obama had a strong hand and threw in his chips. Immediately after his inauguration, he could have announced a bold effort to put America back to work—not a stimulus, but a recovery. When the Republicans threatened to filibuster, he could have taken his case to the American people and demanded an up-or-down vote to save the country.
Instead, Obama meekly allowed the 60-vote super-majority needed to shut off a Senate filibuster to become, for the first time in our nation's history, an automatic veto. No fools, the Republican minority used that power to block everything. If a vital new program didn't automatically have 60 votes, Obama wouldn't even bring it up. It was unilateral disarmament. And so we drifted toward disaster with half-measures forged in back rooms, from the timid stimulus that was a meager Band-Aid, to the timid health-care bill that no one likes, to the timid sellout deals on the deficit.
Read the whole thing. It is so delusionally silly that it's actually bracing.
