Milton Friedman RIP
Capt. JG wrote:
Keynes would be: Government should stay out of it.
Well, Keynes' books are the world's most certain cure for
insomnia, so I can't say for sure... but I've always
understood Keynes' main contribution to be the theory that
the gov't is not like an ordinary business and should not
have the same debt constraints. He is the one (or one of the
group) that convinced FDR to borrow tremendous amounts of
money for the U.S. gov't to try & spend it's way out of the
Depression.
On the more serious side, Keynes is the economist who used
actual real math (calculus even) and showed the numbers to
means something in the real world. Previous economists were
always rather vague ("did I say 3 hundred, oops I meant 3
million") and were quite content if their "equations" even
got positive & negative deltas on the right side.
People often pit Keynes and Galbraith against Friedman, with
some political motive (and later in his career, he played
right into this himself, sadly), but actually the three
don't contradict each other in absolute terms.
DSK
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