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Archive of posts published in the tag: John Maynard Keynes

The Folly of Pragmatism

“Hence, the great irony: Hayek, one of the greatest champions of individual liberty and economic freedom the world has ever known, believed that knowledge was communal. Dewey, the champion of socialism and collectivism, believed that knowledge was individual. Hayek’s is a philosophy that treats individuals as the best judges of their own self-interests, which in turn yield staggering communal cooperation. Dewey’s was the philosophy of a giant, Monty Pythonesque crowd shouting on cue, “We’re All Individuals!”

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The Crash of 1937 and the Rise of Keynes

William Trufant Foster, a former college president, and Waddill Catchings, an industrialist and financier wrote Profits in 1925 and The Road to Plenty in 1928. A decade before Keynes these amateur economists challenged the fundamental principle of Say’s Law that production generates its own supply. They reversed the principle to ‘consumption drives production.’

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The Third Wave of Capitalism

Competition is both wasteful and efficient. Lots of ideas die, but the new ones that emerge more than make up for the loss. Central planning may restrict competitive ideas, but rarely leads to the emergence of great ideas because central planning is reacting to problems and needs that become obsolete before the ink is dry on the plan.

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Corporatism is not Capitalism

Keynes suggested the use of government to make more efficient allocations of capital but was often critical of the incompetence of government officials.  He seems to unknowingly refute himself.  The weak accountability in government action is what distinguishes it from market solutions.  The worst solution is the pairing of select firms to partner with government actors.  When the results fail capitalism is faulted, bur corporatism is not capitalism.

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A Checklist of Priorities

Pragmatism is considered the antithesis of ideology but fails to recognize that it has become an ideology.  Ideological is not the same as dogmatic.  Ideology according to Goldberg is checklist of priorities. 

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The Hong Kong Experiment

He avoided the accumulation of economic data, believing the cost of accumulating outweighed its value. He felt such data was used to enable economic planning which he opposed, and because it instilled a false sense of certainty about outcomes.  Cowperthwaite governed from principles, not data.

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Some Thoughts on 2017

“History does repeat itself, but the soundtrack is different, and the sequel is usually disappointing”. – HO

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How the Modern Economy Mutes Keynes

by Henry Oliner
The obsessive focus on demand also proved misplaced.   Demand and supply ebb and flow in ways far too organic to be managed by central planning. Periods of innovation create new demands.  New products precede their demand and subsequent manufacturing technology continuously turns luxuries into commodities.

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Misunderstanding Money

from Steve Forbes at Forbes Magazine,  Reckoning for Biggest Wrecker of U.S. Economy: Economies aren’t machines that can be calibrated, like automobiles. They are billions of people making decisions numerous times a day. The idea that central planners, whether they’re

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Economics, Science and History

Economics is a bit different from history by the use and study of certain underlying principles. It is  not a physical science but a  social science using scientific methods to analyze and understand. There are certain principles that are quite

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The Most Dysfunctional Ideology

It is not the act of being ideological that disturbs the left, it is the ideology.  Faith in an idea or principle makes you ideological;  faith in their own  ideas and principles makes them pragmatic.  Pragmatism with a capital ‘P’

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Immortal Bad Ideas

from Don Boudreaux’s Cafe Hayek’s Quotation of the Day 2/20/16 … is from pages 292-293 of Richard Vedder’s and Lowell Gallaway’s still-relevant and resonant 1993 book, Out of Work: One of the clichés that has emerged from the Keynesian episode is

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Your Mob Partner

The Donald Trump campaign is more of an effort desired by the American voting public to field a third party than it is a serious desire to advance Republican politics. The reason a third party has never succeeded is that

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The Essence of Capitalism

  From Cafe Hayek, Keynesian Splenetics: Second, Keynes (at least by the time he wrote his General Theory) utterly failed to appreciate the incomprehensibly vast, nuanced, and ever-changing market details each of which must be accounted for and adjusted to in order

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The Gradual Encroachment of Ideas

“It was perhaps John Maynard Keynes who said it best, in the closing chapter of The General Theory: the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than commonly

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Idle Assets and other Economic Thoughts

I wonder if there is such a thing as idle assets.  If one wishes to sit on his money for years because the costs and risks of deploying it are too high is that any different from a land owner

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Keynes and Stable Prices

from the biography John Maynard Keynes by Robert Skidelsky; Keynes was unusual in his stress on the ‘stickiness of social and business arrangements’ and the need it created for completely stable prices if capitalism was to be consistent with social

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A Portion of Keynes

  I have often wondered if Keynes would recognize the policies that are often carried out in his name.  Art Laffer and Kenneth Peterson addressed this question in The Investor’s Business Daily  in Obama Tax Hikes, Aimless Spending Ignore Keynes:

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In Search of Monetary Discipline

Steve Forbes writes Gold and the Wicked Magicians in the November 19, 2012 issues of Forbes. Excerpts: Despite thousands of years of experience to the contrary, central bankers and countless policymakers and economists believe that money manipulation can stimulate and

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The Inevitable vs the Intolerable

Few economic policies demonstrate the difference between intent and outcome more than the minimum wage. Those who push for higher minimum wages in the cause of social justice refuse to accept the outcome that the cost is often shown in

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