In recent years, Posner abandoned his rational-choice approach in law for what he has been calling “pragmatism.” Keynes also thought of himself as a pragmatic, nondoctrinaire person. FULL ARTICLE
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/10820/posner-on-the-precipice/
Posner on the Precipice
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It seems to me the simplest argument against Keynes is one born of psychology. Telling bureaucrats that it’s OK to monetize to ‘save economies’ is like telling someone it’s OK to take heroin but only when you’re feeling sad.
No bureaucracy or organization willingly contracts its power (Mancur Olson beautifully explains). Without the profit motive to guide them, governments are the worst. The result is an inevitable addictive slide to fiscal ruin.
This is the practical derivative of Keynes for citizens like me with a rudimentary understanding of economics.
Pragmatism is code for short-term thinking. Like Keynes said, in the long run we’re all dead, so let’s party like a bunch of frat boys today and pretend there is no tomorrow.
Unfortunately, tomorrow always comes and then we have to deal with the hangovers that result from years of short-run thinking.
fundamentalist,
Pragmatism is also a code-word for economically ignorant.
This sort of thing has happened many times before.
A leftist (such as Keynes) writes a book full of nonsense (such as the basic idea that real wealth can be increased by just creating more money and having the government or private consumers spend it).
The nonsense is carefully refuted – for example by Henry Hazlitt in his “The Failure of the New Economics”.
And generations of “intellectuals” totally ignore all the careful refutations and treat the leftist nonsense works as “classic texts” to be taught to students and used as a guide to policy.
It seems to me that such people who call themselves “pragmatists” are even defaming the originators of the term. William James said somewhere, if I recall correctly, that “Truth is what works on the whole and in the long run”.
should seeboots
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