The Involuntary Unemployment of John Maynard Keynes

...With the explosion of the American deficit due to the Vietnam war confidence in the dollar was eventually undermined, leading to the suspension of gold convertibility in August 1971...

...as easily increase inflation...

...In his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936, Keynes argued that in an entrepreneur economy there was no presumption that investment would be sufficient to maintain continuous full employment...

...Once this double set of expectations had been developed, its self-sustaining character made it extremely difficult for governments to change course once adequate growth had failed to develop...

...As early as 1960, the British economist J.R.C...

...of a unit of labour...

...And in order for capitalism to be accepted by the non-entrepreneurial classes, there also had to be increasingly higher spending on the social services-something to which Keynes himself had never attached much importance...

...But this is unlikely in the case of the United States which is less unionized than most European countries...

...and at the same time to make sure by fiscal and monetary policy that total spending in the economy would equal full employment output...

...yet for ten years, until Milton Friedman's demolition job, the Phillips Curve reigned virtually unchallenged...

...Keynes was torn between his hatred of wasted resources (postponing the moment of liberation from "pressing economic cares") and his hatred of bureaucratic interference with liberty...

...balance of payments deficit is a striking example of the pseudo-solution with a built-in self-destructive momentum...

...Given that Keynes had found a rationale, albeit austere in comparison with that of modern Keynesians, for governmental activity to ameliorate unemployment, he then had to justify and develop a governmental response to the edginess of capitalists which results when government sustains high levels of employment...

...Often we do not solve problems by making the state responsible for them...

...To understand the demand mismanagement which has led to the present impasse, one must understand how the restricted economics of Keynes became the panacea of Keynesian economists, and how the naive politics of Keynes became the diffidence of Keynesian politicians...

...If the growth failed to materialize, the consequences of such policies became inevitable: a bloated public sector in deficit to a private sector whose own resulting shortage of funds had to be made good by printing more money...

...is associated . . . with present day capitalistic individualism...

...it was the two in combination which drastically altered the fiscal stance of modern governments, giving rise to the familiar democratic pathology of the "overloaded" state...

...This was not just a matter of Keynes failing to take on board the political consequences of democracy, well known at the time...

...How important this "cost-push" has been as a cause of inflation is doubtful...

...We simply transfer the problem from the private to the public sector...

...World demand was maintained at a high level through the structural deficit in the American balance of payments: the international equivalent of the pseudo-Keyne-sian budget deficits...

...For much of the twentieth century, the reverse was true: The maladies of economies-poverty, injustice, high unemployment-were ascribed to laissez-faire or insufficiency of government...

...The decline in Keynes's reputation has done wonders for the reputations of long-standing critics of Keynesian economics like Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek...

...So when, as was inevitable, Keynesian results fell short of expectations, Keynesian politicians were left with nothing to communicate to the public...

...This was the general experience in the 1970s...

...Its limited legitimation of government deficit spending could well be adapted, by vulgarization, to the problem of governing a mature/senile capitalism under conditions of mass democracy and powerful trade unions...

...Initial responsibility for adaptation was to fall on creditor countries, debtors being given a "breathing space" in the shape of credit facilities and permission for moderate devaluations to put their houses in order...

...or lead us to belittle the genius of the man who set out to "create the possibility of civilization for all...

...The growth of this deficit proved the only way of combining the politically required level of free world prosperity with the maintenance of relationships of military dependence and political and economic independence in the American-led alliance structures...

...These two types of unemployment could not be reduced by the macroeconomic policy of expanding demand in the product markets, but only by microeconomic measures to increase the efficiency of labor markets...

...The professional opinion of economists that maximum output could and must be continually maintained by political action coincided with other pressures on the political system working to the same end...

...The systemic inflation and creeping bureau-cratization embedded in the political function of Keynesianism seemed a small price to pay for postponing the day of reckoning...

...Beyond this Keynes was very cautious...

...The role of government in the Keynesian system was thus a double one: to improve the conditions of confidence-to give businessmen confidence that the system would last, that property rights would be maintained, and that the demands of workers would be restrained...

...Finally, full employment policies have had to be applied in a world of public and private monopoly...

...It was also Keynes who insisted that his proposals were the only alternative to authoritarian central planning...

...It is certain," he wrote, "that the world will not much longer tolerate the unemployment which...

...In short, he recognized the possibility that government policy may itself be the cause of the pessimism for which government spending then had to compensate...

...In the international sphere, "world Keynesianism" has been adapted to the political necessities of America's role as leader and protector of a pluralist bloc of capitalist democracies...

...This inhibits Western governments from acting to expand demand on the old Keynesian lines in an effort to increase employment, for to do so might just Robert Skidelsky is Professor of International Studies at the University of Warwick and author of The End of the Keynesian Era...

...for the rules devised to restrict the scope of government action by restricting its access to funds were devised, and therefore thought to be of more universal importance, long before the rise of Western democracy...

...Now there is little doubt that involuntary unemployment-the unemployment of those willing to accept but unable to get a lower real wage-has greatly declined since Keynes's day...

...Keynes's own insight that government spending may become a source of diminished business confidence, thereby diminishing the very investment it was meant to augment, tended to be replaced by a wholly mechanical link between public spending and the output of goods and services...

...What has brought about the great disillusion...

...Technical over-optimism was reinforced (and partially induced) by political pessimism...

...In the twentieth century Keynes made loan-financed public spending respectable if done for the purpose of restoring an economy to full employment...

...The first generations of Keynesian economists must take some responsibility for this, mismanagement, though senior Keynes-ians have been foremost in blaming it on the "stupidity" of politicians...

...Large sections of business and the general population had become dependent on inherited and automatically expanding public programs...

...Keynes was quite aware of a possible conflict between the two roles of government...

...The problem in the nineteenth century was to prevent rulers from robbing the wealth-creating sector for the purpose of military conquest or extravagant display...

...Moderate planning will be safe if those carrying it out are rightly orientated in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue . . . Dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly...

...That is to say, we are experiencing once more the levels of unemployment which the Keynesian Revolution had abolished- 13 percent in Belgium, 10 percent in Italy, 10 percent in Britain, 7 percent in the United States-only this time round, unemployment is accompanied by high rates of inflation...

...We have also, since the 1930s, lost a certain amount of innocence about the workings of government...

...Was he perhaps naive about the economic and political consequences of Mr...

...There opened up a wonderful vista wherein public spending up to any level that was thought politically necessary would itself promote the growth to finance it...

...This line of thought has been developed by monetarist economists who argue that it is discretionary variations in the money supply which play the major role in destabilizing the entrepreneur economy...

...But his theory lent itself all too readily to the following vulgarizations: a) that state spending for any purpose was good since it kept up demand...

...This view made him unduly dismissive of certain "fixed rules'' of finance of bygone eras which were meant to curb a perceived inherent tendency of rulers towards extravagance and dishonesty...

...Another example is equally instructive...

...By rejecting the full employment assumption of the classical economists, Keynes saw that state spending, even on "useless" projects, could maintain output and investment at levels higher than they would otherwise have been...

...But even where trade unions are more important, one can still maintain that governments cause inflation by making political commitments to overfull employment which give unions the power to force them to expand the money supply to "save jobs...

...He would at any rate have exerted his great authority to forestall our present hopeless impasse in which governments are increasingly reduced to governing through the lever of mass unemployment as a consequence of their failure to tackle earlier the growth of trade union power...

...so did the social democrats...

...But of course the blame was by no means theirs alone...

...In practical terms this meant that any increase in businessmen's pessimism about the future must be offset by increased government spending to compensate for an increased propensity to hoard...

...The notion that 5 percent unemployment spelt political death for any government which allowed it, and a "crisis of legitimacy" for the system as a whole, was for long an article of faith that united economists and politicians until disproved by events...

...In it he argued that by keeping employment and investment continually high for a couple of generations, governments would be able to solve the poverty problem once and for all, freeing Western man to tackle his "permanent problem- how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy his leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well...

...That investment decisions taken by the state might emerge as a byproduct of a political roulette seems also not to have occurred to him...

...The humanitarian impulse behind this strategy is unquestionable...

...Was it his fault...

...to accept a reward corresponding to its marginal productivity...

...the end result of which is a static or declining level of employment maintained by increasing doses of inflation...

...The reaction against the Keynesian sophistication of economic discourse has already started (Margaret Thatcher and Wedgwood Benn in England, Ronald Reagan in the United States) and there is no knowing where it will end...

...In effect, governments were assured that it lay within their power to fix the unemployment percentage at any politically acceptable level without running into significant inflationary problems...

...But a serious flaw in political thinking is revealed by Keynes's comment that the state "is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage...

...The first generation of Keynesians, as products of the Depression, had no faith in the "natural" resilience of the entrepreneur economy...

...I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say that we almost certainly want more...

...But perhaps a more fundamental problem arises from the inherent limitation of any economic technique, however soundly reasoned, as an instrument of governing...

...His aim was to make a decentralized system- what he called an "entrepreneur economy"-work with less damaging fluctuations and at a higher level of continuous employment than was the case between the wars...

...Chiefly, I think, the realization that after thirty years or so of Keynesian economic management we are back to where we started, but with a seriously constricted range of attractive options...

...The unhesitating and unreflective extension of full employment policy to the needs of this world can be seen, first, in the dropping of Keynes's own distinction between voluntary and involuntary unemployment which proved unacceptable to the trade union leaders, and second, in the failure to demand any quid pro quo-a wage-price policy, restriction on strike action, labor market reforms-for the full employment service being provided...

...Or was his revolution absorbed by other developments which deflected it from its original purposes...

...b) that public spending was better, since in some sense more "rational," than private spending...

...This excluded both frictional, seasonal, and regional unemployment, and, much more importantly, all unemployment caused by "a refusal...

...No pressure was brought on either surplus or deficit countries to bring their current accounts into equilibrium...

...This, of course, implied a continued though limited public sector borrowing requirement, since the government would have to borrow to invest, like any private businessman...

...Governors and governed must in the end speak a common language, and it cannot be the language of Keynesian economics...

...In practice, the postwar monetary system developed without any effective adjustment mechanism at all...

...This clear indication of the decline in the ability of Keynesian eco nomics to do "political work," however, should not blind us to the genuine "economic work" which Keynesiansim ac complished, even in its bowdlerized form...

...The gamble that loan-financed public spending would under virtually all circumstances produce the growth to finance it becomes understandable in the light of the political problems facing Western governments...

...Harold Wilson's dictum that "a week is a long time in politics" explains much of what has gone wrong in the application of Keynes's ideas...

...It clearly can be, because businessmen have a variety of psychological impulsions to increase investment regardless of the rate of interest...

...Can Keynes, therefore, be indicted for fatuous optimism spilling indiscriminately into a panoptic sanguinity about the future...

...I would prefer to lay more stress on the failings of political systems which trap politicians in short-term calculations...

...Increased government spending, he warned Roosevelt, might depress private investment by an equal amount even in conditions of high unemployment if businessmen were worried by the objects of the expenditure or the methods by which it was financed...

...It is easy to show how, in the absence of incomes policies, trade unions and business oligopolies can between them push up prices even when labor and goods are in excess supply...

...It is this pull of incompatible requirements which explains the character of the "competition for votes" which developed after the Second World War, and the increasingly desperate faith that public spending could induce the growth which would provide the wherewithal to keep both parties happy...

...A classic instance of this technical over-optimism was the so-called Phillips Curve which, on the basis of a historical time series, assured governments of the existence of a stable, and politically very favorable, "trade-off between unemployment and inflation...

...Quite simply, a combination of technical over-optimism and political nervousness caused politicians to promise more than Keynes himself ever promised or than macro-economic policy could ever deliver...

...The old view that the state was always available to compensate, in a relatively costless way, for "market failure" is now seen as having been much too simple...

...Government was viewed as an unexplored, or at least unexploited, political resource, available to correct the "flaws" of capitalism...

...The decline in the political utility of Keynesian economics has in turn weakened the cause of political moderation, giving fresh life to the two traditional, and in political terms, antagonistic anti-Keynesian ideologies: Marxism and laissez-faire capitalism...

...The General Theory was directed to explaining and remedying one segment of unemployment only-what Keynes called "involuntary unemployment...

...Modern Keynesians say the only solution to this dilemma is incomes policy-wage and price controls...

...so did the welfare economists...

...It is true that in his political pamphlets for Lloyd George, Keynes made sport of "crowding out," arguing that the same illogic which states that government crowds out business means that businesses 6ught also to crowd each other out, and that therefore aggregate investment could never be raised...

...I should be quite content with a reasonable approximation to it, and in practice I should relax my expansionist measures a little before technical full employment had actually been achieved...

...It all seems madness today...

...But they did not adequately understand the techniques they were using (except in an immediate political sense) and no one understood their explanations...

...For as a political formula Keynesianism was too valuable to be restricted to the economic uses for which the founder intended it...

...Vulgarized Keynesianism, they would argue, was the only way to salvage a decaying capitalism perceived to be on the brink of imminent collapse, at the cost of intensifying its contradictions in the future...

...Whether this deterioration of Keynesian policy into an all-purpose governing formula was inevitable is difficult to say...

...What I have tried to show is how the Keynesian remedy for a specific disease of capitalism (involuntary unemployment) was turned into a pseudo-Keynesian pseudo-solution to the much more fundamental problems of governing divided societies, thereby bringing the inevitable crisis and reaction...

...As the Great Depression gathered force in 1930 he wrote an essay entitled "The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren...

...in the course of doing so, we saddle governments with what Professor Anthony King has called "growing reach and declining grasp...

...Just as neoclassical economics was blamed quite wrongly for the failures of laissez-faire (despite the fact that it was used to support egalitarian welfare policies), so Keynesian economics has been blamed for the growing decay of political authority despite the fact that it contributed to three decades of unparalleled prosperity...

...This was the theory that it is investment which creates savings, not the other way round as the classical economists had taught...

...attacks on the Welfare State from the Right: These are the twin political fruits of the Keynesian era...

...So much, then, for the contribution of the postwar Keynesians...

...The easiest way for any economist to make a name for himself is to attack the fallacies of the Keynesians...

...From this point of view, the increasing reversion by politicians to the simpler language of nineteenth-century economics reflects not just disillusionment with the results of pseudo-Keynesianism, but also the need of politicians to regain an audience as a preliminary to the revival of the art of government...

...The discriminate reasoning of Keynes-not the indiscriminate reasoning of Keynesiansunderlies Professor Friedman's notion of a "natural" rate of unemployment...

...Of the poverty and looming political revolt of the Third World, there is not a hint in Keynes's writings...

...In other words, having dealt with consumption, Keynes now had to deal with investment...

...Labor was involuntarily unemployed only when it wished to work for a reduced real wage but was unable to do so, because it could not reduce its real wage by accepting a lower money wage...

...In retrospect, nothing is more striking, given Keynes's emphasis on uncertainty, than his own confidence in the future...

...Keynes, therefore, must take some responsibility for- legitimizing, through omission and a propensity to avoid pointed criticism, certain misapplications of his doctrine, although he is less responsible for its economic than for its political waywardness...

...Whether he would have drawn the conclusion that full employment policies in the new era of trade union bargaining power, job protection legislation, generous unemployment benefits, and a public ethos of government responsibility for economic welfare, required statutory control of incomes is impossible to say...

...On the other side, governments were responsible to electorates the majority of which controlled a minority of wealth and looked to state action to compensate for this deficiency...

...But the planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers, wholly share your moral position...

...All governing formulas which break down tend to discredit the kernel of scientific truth or plain wisdom which they contain...

...Given the inescapable uncertainty surrounding future events, the likelihood was that a part of what was produced would not be spent, but would be hoarded, or kept liquid, for the purpose of speculation or as a precaution against future loss...

...The name of Keynes has become something of a liability to governments which for years worshipped at the shrine, thus confirming that in politics there are only marriages of convenience...

...It was based on the assumption that the legitimacy of capi-talism was so precarious, its wealth-producing potential so enfeebled, that it required continuous political reinforcement if it was not to collapse into either fascism or Communism...

...Those who do not realize this," he wrote in 1940, "have not grasped what the Americans call 'the big idea.'" How then has his revolution come to be associated with results which, in many respects, were contrary to his intentions...

...or that the United States, as leader of the capitalist world, should have made itself responsible, by sustaining a chronic balance of payments deficit, for keeping its major trading partners in a state of boom...

...In 1944 Keynes read von Hayek's Road to Serfdom...

...Statist and socialist economics on the Left...

...Not for the first time, Keynes attempted to cover up an inconsistency or ambiguity in his own position by means of what is little better than a clever debating point...

...The cost-push theorists maintain that trade unions cause inflation...

...but he did not come to bury it either...

...It applies mainly to the monopoly sectors of such highly unionized countries as Britain...

...Common to Keynesians and the politicians who used their ideas was the belief that somehow one could "model" the whole economy, pull certain levers, and expect certain results to follow more or less mechanically...

...After all, it is much easier to understand homilies on the virtues of individual self-reliance-which can be derived from extremely sophisticated moral and economic argumentthan it is to understand any comparable simplifications of Keynesian economics...

...It is important to bear in mind the very restricted nature of the problem to which he saw his technique as an answer, as well as the very provisional character of the answer he gave...

...They were trapped in the circle of their own pseudo-solutions...

...One part of his doctrine, however, did lend itself to much more radical fiscal conclusions...

...He had an excessively elitist or oligarchic view of the political process, one which he bequeathed to his disciples...

...In the nineteenth century, enlightened opinion was virtually united in its mistrust of the state...

...Let us start with the question of Keynes's own responsibility, which involves, first of all, asking what he set out to achieve...

...or to the problem of maintaining an international capitalist system which, at the end of the war, was faced with an inexorable need to expand in a world in which it had already permeated every corner...

...I would prefer to say that governments cause inflation, and cause themselves to grow, and cause themselves to lose authority...

...That it had succeeded in maintaining a "reasonably satisfactory average level of employment'' in the nineteenth century was due to a conjuncture of special circumstances which had passed away...

...Even more than in the case of the permanent domestic budget deficit, the permanent U.S...

...The ills of economies were ascribed to political interference...

...any reduction in the money wage causing the general price level to fall leaving real wages unchanged...

...The permanent budget deficit with its attendant inflationary consequences is a good illustration of how Keynes's own limited solutions to quite precise problems were perverted by political necessities into pseudo-solutions for much more general and unrelated problems...

...His obiter dicta concerning the pathological propensities of bankers and other apostles of "sound money'' gave much pleasure to generations of Cambridge students...

...To this end, he devised a set of institutions and rules, only partially embodied in the Bretton Woods Agreements of 1944, to ease the pain of adjustment...

...These misapplications, however, would no doubt have occurred anyway, whatever the warnings he bequeathed...

...From another side, protective commu nitarian approaches to economic life can be much more readily communicated in the language of socialism or nationalism than in the language of Keynes...

...This led by easy steps to the debased doctrine that all government spending creates its own revenues...

...The possibility that governments, armed with democratic mandates, might use pseudo-Keynesian legitimations for purposes quite other than Keynes intended, and in fact destructive of the values Keynes believed in, seems not to have occured to him...

...It was, he told Hayek, "a grand book . . . Morally and philosophically I found myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it.'' He went on: I should therefore conclude your theme rather differently...

...Understandable as this comment appears at the time-when Keynes was very alive to the fact that Hitler had been the first practicing Keynesian-this is actually an inadequate response to Hayek, for it ignores the fact that the enlargement of the state which Keynes wanted itself alters public and private morality...

...He also sanctioned a larger permanent role for the state in creating capital assets...

...On the one side were the needs of capitalism which included not just an expensive array of public goods, but also the assurance that property rights would not be tampered with, the latter presupposing a definite limit to taxation...

...Since the 1930s the potentialities of government have been much more fully exploited, and the results have been found wanting...

...The first generation of Keynesians tended to be social democrats in politics...

...Keynes believed this...

...Believing that public life was and should be managed by an intellectual and moral elite, his only concern was that the existing elite had the wrong ideas and was in need of conversion...

...In America, the inflationary pressures which built up in the 1960s are more plausibly ascribed to the lack of external discipline on public and private spending-the result of the privileged position of the dollar in the international monetary system...

...Politicians, of course, were expected to communicate what they were trying to do...

...It is no coincidence that the first industrial nation (Britain) should have been the one to have carried Keynesian policy to its greatest degree of refinement over the longest period of time...

...The political analysis is more dubious...

...Once converted, it would then act rightly...

...It was Keynes who wrote "There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency"-and whatever Keynes had in mind, it was not to overturn the existing basis of society...

...Rather it was that in his eagerness for government action on unemployment Keynes was willing to jettison the wisdom of the nineteenth century, drawn from the experience of earlier times...

...Giant private corporations, nationalized industries, municipalities, and trade unions have all functioned, to a greater or lesser extent, as monopolistic suppliers of goods and services...

...Yet, as Professor Meade has pointed out, Keynesian policy since the Second World War has ignored Keynes's own distinction between voluntary and involuntary unemployment and has treated virtually all unemployment as susceptible to reduction by expanding demand...

...Unpalatable though the conclusion may be, the constant reiteration by the British Prime Minister that workers are "pricing themselves out of jobs" is, under modern conditions of trade union organization, strictly in accord with the letter of Chapter 2 of Keynes's General Theory, though not perhaps with the spirit of the book as a whole...

...and explains the revival of the "crowding out" argument- the conservative thesis that government borrowing competes with private borrowing, driving up the rate of interest and impairing private investment-which Keynes was thought to have killed...

...Marxists would no doubt say it was...

...One thinks particularly of the balanced-budget rule and the gold-standard rule...

...Would we have had growing inflation and bloated government even had there been no Keynesian revolution...

...Secondly, Keynes was much more modest than many postwar Keynesians about what his technique could achieve in reducing even "involuntary unemployment...

...but only on the understanding that throughout this process politicians are acting in the way which seems to them the easiest to overcome their immediate political problems...

...But what modern Keynesians do not realize, and what Keynes did realize, is that these same nonrational impulsions are debilitated by the blow to confidence which results from large government deficits (and only secondarily from the borrowing required to finance them...

...The old conflict between authoritarian central planning and market economics which Keynes seemed to have transcended has returned...

...and Keynesianism entered politics as a social democratic formula, in which high levels of public spending performed the double function of maximizing output and employment and redistributing resources from rich to poor...

...Its chief symptom was the permanent budget deficit, now called the "public sector borrowing requirement.'' In the nineteenth century governments borrowed from the public only for war emergencies...

...d) that people who insisted on strict rules of finance were killjoys who believed in progress only through pain...

...That the name of Keynes should have come to be associated with inflation and the spawning of bureaucracy is an ironic verdict on someone who loathed both...

...It was held that a mature capitalist economy had a natural and increasing tendency towards depression or "stagnation" which could be offset only by increasingly higher levels of public spending...

...But this implies either legal coercion, which is highly unattractive, or centralized agreements Between governments, trade unions, and business leaderships which have not only been unattainable, except for short periods, but which also carry disagreeable implications of corporatism...

...Here again, Keynes's own proposals, over-ambitious as they seemed at the time, were models of financial caution compared to what followed...

...His object was to abolish slumps by stabilizing booms...

...In reply to a critic, he wrote in 1936: I agree that our methods of control are unlikely to be sufficiently delicate or sufficiently powerful to maintain continuous full employment...

...We must be clear about one thing...

...Keynes wanted to retain the advantages of the old gold-standard system (chiefly currency convertibility at fixed exchange rates) while eliminating the savage deflationary adjustments which the old system had prescribed as the only alternative to the Protection and competitive devaluations which broke up the world economy in the 1930s...

...Keynes did not come to praise capitalism...

...Technical full employment" in the strict Keynesian sense included, we must remember, an allowance for a lesser or greater volume of "voluntary unemployment...

...And it stretches credibility to maintain that in Europe as a whole (including Britain) there was excess labor supply in the 1950s and 1960s, when unemployment was at one or two percent and when there was a massive influx of foreign labor...

...Dow found that fiscal policy as pursued by British governments was actively destabilizing...

...If Keynes can be faulted for failing to spell out more clearly the political and industrial consequences of the attempt to maintain permanent boom conditions, he was also guilty of considerable naivete about the modus operandi of the political system which he supposed capable of bringing about these conditions...

...These governments were committed to maintaining mature capitalist systems under conditions of genuine mass democracy...

...These considerations allow us to infer that Keynes himself would have regarded the project of running the economy at a one to two percent level of unemployment by demand management alone as quite unrealistic...

...c) that budget deficits were the only way a capitalist economy could be kept going...

...Even though the rationale and to some extent the political support for them had eroded, they could not be reduced without plunging the economy into a depression...

...But it may be possible by a right analysis of the problem to cure the disease while preserving efficiency and freedom...

...Keynes was rightly critical of the capitalistic process by which investment decisions emerged as the "byproduct of the operations of a casino...