Peter Foster | Dec 18, 2012 8:03 PM ET | Last Updated: Dec 18, 2012 8:07 PM ET
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Corbis-Bettmann/UPIEconomist John Maynard Keynes
Keynesianism has extended downturn, despite recent praise
We are now approaching the fourth Christmas of the great debate between the benign supporters of Santa Keynes and the walnut-hearted acolytes of the Hayekian Grinch. Or at least that’s how Keynesians seem to see it.
Prominent statist fans of John Maynard Keynes such as Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and George Stiglitz, and Keynes’ biographer Lord Robert Skidelsky, tend to be moralists who castigate their opponents as flinty-eyed masochists rather than level-headed students of immutable laws. Their indignant question is “Would you have us do nothing?” The response from supporters of Friedrich Hayek and his “Austrian” free-market economics is: “Yes, since what you are doing is making things worse. Moreover, it’s your policies that cause crises in the first place.”
Mais