This is the type of ignorance I always complain about. Keynes wasn’t a communist or even a socialist. He did all of his work, both theory and policy, under the umbrella of a market economy, with privately owned firms, private investors, private property, and prices based on supply and demand. Even the bastardized version of his work that is called “Keynesianism,” (involving stimulus spending) wasn’t even his own work and ALSO works under the umbrella of a market economy.
Keynes and his followers don’t advocate the abolition of private property or the nationalization of industry or government control of prices.
It is enough to say that Keynes’ analysis had mistakes, and it is enough to say that what is erroneously called “Keynesianism” is bad policy. There is no need to lie and say he was a communist or socialist. Same goes for Democrats—some are socialist, a handful are communist, but most of them don’t want to abolish the market. They may advocate bad policy but not necessarily socialist or communist policy.
This kind of ignorant name-calling makes conservatives look like medieval peasants who call everybody they don’t like a witch.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Communism.html
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Socialism.html
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marxism.html
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/KeynesianEconomics.html
Keynes’ deviate socialist circle was almost completely pro-bolshevik. One month after the Revolution, J.M. Keynes wrote his mother”
“Well, the only course open to me is to be buoyantly bolshevik; and as I lie in bed in the morning I reflect with a good deal of satisfaction that, because our rulers are as incompetent as they are mad and wicked, one particular era of a particular kind of civilization is very nearly over.”
http://www.knology.net/~bilrum/keynes.htm
Keynes called, from what I understand, for government to time its spending on generally-useful things [i.e. things that benefit an open-ended set of people], to be counter-cyclical. I think that's bad policy, but it's vastly different from abominations like Cash for Clunkers, whose whole purpose was to destroy wealth. I think the fundamental point which is missed by those who suggest that government spending should increase when the economy is down is that any tax money that the government spends on any project is either money that the individual from whom it is taken can't spend on anything else, and any money the government borrows represents money diverted from useful investments. It is in theory possible for the government to spend money in ways which grow the general economy more than would anything that individuals would do with it, especially if it spends on things with positive network externalities. Unfortunately, expenditures which have essentially zero general utility are often more politically useful to those in power.