Replies

This article is at the center of a conversation I'm having with a lib-prog I work with on some community events and I thought the re-launch of FR deserves a good stirring of the group. While it's easy to pick this guy apart on multiple points, I'd like to see FReepers respond at a higher level on how such thinking is countered with successful employment of conservative principles.

Also, he refers to a J.M. Keynes quote that I didn't paste over from the article. Here it is:

"We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterized the 19th century is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down — at any rate in Great Britain; that a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in the decade which lies ahead of us.

I believe that this is a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us. We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another…”

John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)