too bad Keynes was basically like, “so let’s just do it anyway, and only try to soften the blow a teensy bit”
Imagine getting this close to the point
Libertarians love to bitch about “Keynesian economics”. I just realized it’s been forever since I’ve even heard his name mentioned, not once since I left ancap circles.
But of course that’s because Keynesianism is just neoliberalism and leftists correctly identify it as just a piece of the bourgeois system.
Edit - I’ve been corrected, Keynes’ ideas were different and better. I’m misremembering my college econ courses.
Keynesianism is just neoliberalism
I don’t know if that’s completely fair. Keynesianism is slightly better than neoliberalism. At least it recognizes that people actually like, need money if they are going to live under capitalism.
Keynesianism isn’t neoliberalism. It’s certainly still capitalist, but neoliberalism was reaction against Keynesian economics.
The 2008 financial crisis proved that Keynesianism can exist within the neoliberal system for wealthy countries that make up the reserve currencies of the world. Prior to that the thinking was that printing money just resulted in rapid inflation, and that hasn’t been the case.
Except QE is not a genuine Keynesian counter-cyclical fiscal policy… I guess we could understand the two terms more “broadly”, but at a certain point the meaning becomes so vague it would useless to talk about them
Keynesianism is a bourgeois economic theory, but it’s explicitly not neoliberal in the Reagan-Thatcher-Chicago School sense
(Though to further muddy the waters, the so-called Neo-Keynesians are neoliberal; original Keynesian economics of Keynes, Galbraith, Kaldor et al. are quite different from Krugman and Mankiw)
The thing about Keynes is that his ideas are probably the best way to keep a capitalist system from violently imploding.
Capitalism won’t be kept away from violently imploding as long as the contradictions within it exist, which of course won’t ever go away because they’re an intrinsic feature of the system itself
Keyseian economics do cover the tracks of a substantial portion of the contradictions within capitalism. Namely, you can prevent virtually any large enterprise from going belly up this way.
The problem is that this then creates a massive upwards transfer of wealth from petite bourgeois/middle class to the ruling class, which is in many ways more likely to lead to fascism than socialism, as the working classes position can forever remain stagnant, without serious decline (although the pandemic really did change this, but a normal financial crisis wouldn’t) under expansionary economics. The rise of socialism mostly happened during a period where the economic health of many countries had a massive rapid decline in the standard of living even for the working class.
Libertarians bitch about it but in the end Keynes was mostly right while their precious Austrian School economists are showing more and more every day how wrong they were. Keynes beat Friedman.
As others have said, I’m not sure it’s fair to equate neoliberalism with Keynesianism. Keynes was basically right in pointing out how to maximize capitalism’s effectiveness and arguably, how to make the benefits of capitalism spread to the most number people. I feel like if Keynes was alive today he’d probably jive well with someone like Yanis.
The “layman” libertarian argument for austrian economics over keynesianism is that keynesianism will always result in a massive upwards transfer of wealth under a capitalist system at least in the short term (as you can always tax it back).
Under the gold standard you didn’t really see countries hyper inflate, and the value of an average person’s wealth wasn’t in decline relative to that of the ruling classes. However there was massive economic stagnation as the money supply couldn’t keep up with changing rates of economic growth across different economies.
Keynesianism has been applied to the neoliberal system, but early adopters of neoliberalism felt that keynesianism simply wouldn’t work and supported austerity economics instead. Look at how the EU handled the financial crisis in 2008 compared to the US for example.
Deficit politics make a lot more sense when you view things through the above lense.
Keynes
:LIB:
One of the clear benefits of state capitalism (i.e. government ownership of the nation’s largest for profit enterprises), is that in the event of a financial crisis you can shove a bunch of money into them in a way that isn’t just a massive upwards transfer of wealth.
In 2020, Keynes would absolutely be a Dengist.
