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Capt. JG Capt. JG is offline
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First recorded activity by BoatBanter: Jul 2006
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Default Milton Friedman RIP

Actually, I should have said that Keynes said gov't shouldn't stay out of
it. Not sure why my brain stopped working momentarily. :-) He advocated
intervention through monetary policy.

So, to do a one-liner, it would be Keynes: Money matters if the government
uses it.

--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com

"DSK" wrote in message
...
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