The Keynesian Revolution: A new biography of John Maynard Keynes

1. Wealth is a verb, not a noun, at least at macroeconomic scales. The wealth of nations is measured by how much they do more than how much they have.

2. Governments and perhaps other large entities should spend counter-cyclically. This makes sense in terms of dampening cycles but also in terms of getting the most value for that money. If you can spend during a recession, you get a bargain.

Keynes did not advocate unlimited money printing and he would be horrified by the sheer amount of debt in modern economies.

He was critical of hard gold pegs, but didn't necessarily advocate the perhaps equally insane opposite.

Also agree about Marx. His fans misunderstand him as much as his critics. What most people associate with Marx comes more from Lenin and Stalin.

I would add Ayn Rand to the list of totally misunderstood thinkers both by her fans and her critics. She was a heretical liberal humanist, not a conservative and definitely not a reactionary.

One curious thing I've noticed is that if you have a discussion between Marxists of the classical and less Leninist sort and Randians you will find huge areas of overlap outside economics. These include technology, the notion of progress, science, the importance of education, etc.

The root problem with printing money is not inflation, it's wealth transfer. Printing money, whether it leads to inflation (increase in average price level--note that this usage of the term "inflation" is itself a product of Keynes, its older and more proper use was "increase in the quantity of money") or not, always means a transfer of wealth from whoever does not get some of the printed money to whoever does. In other words, it is a transfer of buying power.

In the current situation, where the transfer is spread widely across everyone and has the explicit effect of compensating people for loss of income due to no fault of their own, it is hard to argue that the transfer is a bad thing, and it won't cause much economic distortion or misallocation of resources because the printed money is going to be spent on much the same things as the lost income would have been spent on anyway. So the buying power is being used for much the same things as it was before.

However, in most cases of printing money, the transfer is very different. The way the US government has been doing it basically since the Federal Reserve existed, it is a transfer from everyone who is not a financial institution, to financial institutions. This causes serious economic distortion and misallocation of resources, because it significantly changes what the buying power is used for. That is why, for example, we have McMansions galore in the US and newly constructed office space sitting empty for years in many metro areas, while we also have many ordinary citizens having trouble making ends meet, crumbling infrastructure, and underfunded basic services: because printing money and giving it to financial institutions redirects buying power to housing purchased with mortgages and commercial construction funded with loans, instead of what the people whose buying power has been transferred away would have spent it on.

You can see that on a Pournelle chart of political ideology which maps ideology on a 2d graph instead of just a line.

>...The x-axis, "Attitude toward the State" (labeled statism), refers to a political philosophy's attitude toward the state and centralized government. The farthest right is "state worship" and the farthest left represents the state as the "ultimate evil", preferring individual freedom.

>...The y-axis, "Attitude toward planned social progress" (labeled rationalism), refers to the extent which a political philosophy is compatible with the idea that social problems can be solved by the use of reason.

Ayn Rand and various Marxists would likely both score high on the rationalism scale (and be at close to opposite sides of the statism scale).

(There might be many other multi-dimensional mappings that work better to map political ideology, but anything is likely better than the common practice of just mapping all ideology on a single line.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pournelle_chart

And he even says right there in the quote it would be better to have people do something productive.

But what about Keynes idea that Europe as a whole was in economic ruin and it was necessary to rebuild it with economic aid or it would lead to political disaster. He seems to be to have been right about that.