just posting this, because given modern debate I think this will shock some. Guess what, Keynes isn't the Spawn of Satan and what he actually believed is much different than what his ideas got twisted into by politicians, imagine that. He was brilliant, the problem with what he helped create though was it was always going to be dependent on some white horse type savior to come in and fix things, which is why Friedman wanted the Fed to be ran by a computer program or be more decentralized, though not abolished altogether.

never the less, Friedman studied the Depression and the Fed alot, he had a great deal of influence over much of our prosperity the last few decades.




that video cuts off what all he was saying about Keynes at the end, but I think this excerpt of Keynes helps drive it home:

from pages 220-233 of The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919):

Quote:By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls . . . become 'profiteers', who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished not less than the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds . . . all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless.

Keynes would likely roll over in his grave if he knew what was being done in his name, but for his era he got the western world out of a major bind.

the Purpose of true Keynsian Economics was mainly about how to stop an Economy from Imploding in recession, it didn't have anything to do with how to "Grow an Economy" and he had little reason to develop such a theory at the time. Never the less, "Keynsian Economics" has evolved.

He sowed the seeds of something worse. Runaway Inflation.