this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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chapotraphouse
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Um....60's conservatives sound like leftists; has the Overton window since then been yanked that far right (I don't know a thing about Keynesian economics, or at least I don't remember it since I studied economics in uni over a decade ago)?
Keynes Unlike Friedman and Hayek had a brain and his ideas are much more useful ,though it’s basically just delaying the inevitable end of capitalism
I think even in China they do teach Keynesian
Keynes is one of the few capitalist thinkers I actually respect.
Even chuds tacitly agree with him as they’re talking about how we should all put our blind faith in porky.
“You see, when porky has all that money he will do the consuming for us! That creates jobs, stupid leftist!”
….sooooo, demand is driving growth?
I have no idea why anyone respects Hayek of Friedman
Kinda, for context, at this time in America, Nixon founded the EPA, proposed a bill for ubi*, and reparations were being discussed. This was without a doubt the high water mark for progressivism in the west. The governments involved were still rabidly anti-communist but they understood that a well off populace was far less likely to become revolutionary.
Keynesian economics is the basis of programs like the New Deal, short version is that during economic busts, the government should reduce taxes and deficit spend on work programs to revive the economy, and during boom times to cut spending and raise taxes to pay off the previous deficit.
I think the last point is kinda what sets Keynes apart from most other capitalist thinkers - the boom bust circle as acknowledged instead of pretending you can make line go up, forever
from my understanding it's that the west gets some form of wellfare state and the global south stays fucked. Also increase in public spending to counter recessions instead of austerity.
Im sure someone has a better answer though.
yeah its basically that. in brief: government intervenes in the economy to do welfare and to take an economy out of a crisis (which Keynes considers to be both periods of high unemployment but also when GDP growth is too high). it was the dominant form of economic theory in the west until stagflation (which is when unemployment and recession are so bad that even the government cant fix it with keynesian mechanisms) and oil crises hit in the 1970s-80s, so governments had to sell national monopolies and defund all their social programs to stay afloat, which is where neoliberalism comes from.
Had to? Or opportunistically started to treat government spending as if it worked like a checkbook with the explicit purpose of punishing the working class?
yeah i kind of oversimplified the story. the finance sector used its leverage at the time to force governments to pay out their debts. of course a more pro-worker government could choose not to do that, but in a bourgeois dictatorship the state and banks work in tandem more or less.
Keynesian economics is a relic of the past. It worked in the past when the profitability of western economies was much higher. However, the rapid accumulation of capital during the Keynesian period also tanked western profitability, leading them straight into neoliberalism.
Keynesian economics feels more left to us today because social democrats want a return to keynesianism. In the same way, there are elements of feudalism that may seem "left-wing" to us today, such as the fact that peasants got more days off and took better care of the environment.
Keynesianism is not left-wing though. It was supported in the past by conservatives because it advanced the interests of capital. Keynesianism created an economy in which capitalists could grow very wealthy very quickly, and the western imperialists could accumulate large quantities of advanced weapons. That period however, is over. What advances the interests of capital today is different from what advanced them in the past. So conservatives have changed.