That the state might exceed its remit and damage the market by distorting its operations was not taken very seriously in these years.
So what have Keynes’s ‘madmen in authority’ done with the ideas they inherited from defunct economists? They have set about dismantling the properly economic powers and initiatives of the state.
Over the past thirty years we have thrown all this away.
Nothing, of course, is ever quite as good as we remember. The social democratic consensus and the welfare institutions of the postwar decades coincided with some of the worst town planning and public...
Moreover, it was social democracy and the welfare state that bound the professional and commercial middle classes to liberal institutions in the wake of World War II.
Keynes himself had taken the view that capitalism would not survive if its workings were reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means to get wealthier.
Keynes himself had taken the view that capitalism would not survive if its workings were reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means to get wealthier. It was
However, for Keynes it had become self-evident that the best defense against political extremism and economic collapse was an increased role for the state, including but not confined to countercyclica...
History is not written as it was experienced, nor should it be. The inhabitants of the past know better than we do what it was like to live there, but they were not well placed, most of them, to under...
En palabras de Sartre: «Ser libre no es hacer lo que uno quiere, sino en querer hacer lo que uno puede».
They were increasingly perceived as restrictions upon the self-expression and freedom of the individual.
Place of the male proletariat there were now posited the candidacies of ‘blacks’, ‘students’, ‘women’ and, a little later, homosexuals. Since none of these constituents, at home or abroad, was separat...
Thinking ‘economistically’, as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans.
They convey neither conviction nor authority.
There were no disagreements in Stalin’s universe, only heresies; no critics, only enemies; no errors, only crimes. The trials served both to illustrate Stalin’s virtues and identify his enemies’ crime...
The narcissism of student movements, new Left ideologues and the popular culture of the ’60s generation invited a conservative backlash.
The most obvious symptom of the change came in the form of ‘planning’.
Shanghai—the term denotes people who have gathered together into affluent subdivisions of suburbs and cities and fondly suppose themselves functionally independent of the rest of society.
Our problem is to work out a social organization which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life. —JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
Keynes’s warning on this matter: [i]t is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better...