Here’s a letter to the Washington Post:
Robert Samuelson highlights a significant danger of Keynesian economics – namely, it lends a patina of scientific legitimacy to the “political bias … to favor short-term stimulus (by lowering taxes and raising spending), which is popular, and to ignore long-term deficits (by cutting spending and raising taxes)” (“Bye-bye Keynes?” Dec. 19).
This danger should have been perceived from the get-go. Keynes himself was famously obsessed with affecting government policy. So he focused his brilliant intellect on the short-run rather than on the long-run; on the seen rather than on the unseen; on the superficial rather than on the foundational; on what is politically expedient today rather than on what is economically sound tomorrow.
As Elizabeth and Harry Johnson note about Keynes, “One could argue indeed that in a certain sense all of his writing was journalism of one order or another – from his plan for a state bank for India, quickly put together for a Royal Commission’s report, to A Treatise on Money and The General Theory which, though presented as academic works, sought to produce instant cures for pressing economic ills. He wrote for the present moment….”*
How regrettable.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030* Elizabeth S. Johnson and Harry G. Johnson, The Shadow of Keynes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 31.
