Keynesians at Bay

When I wrote The Failure of the “New Economics,” in 1959, I nourished the hope that a theorem-by-theorem analysis of the Keynesian fallacies, as they were stated in the words of the Master himself, might at last shake the Keynesians out of their dogmatic slumber. I ought to have known better. If they could keep remumbling their clichés and incantations for nearly a quarter of a century, in total disregard of the failure of their medicine to lead to anything but more government controls and perpetual inflation, it was naive to expect that a mere theoretical analysis would lead them to do any fresh thinking.

Their instinct for self-preservation had led them, in fact, to work out over the years a defensive technique precisely designed to protect them from the necessity of re-examining their assumptions or their logic. The essence of that technique was to dismiss all critics of Keynes on the ground that the poor fellows were just incapable of understanding the Master’s profundities. Keynes himself prepared this line of defense at the very beginning. In the Preface to his General Theory he endeavored to ridicule or intimidate his critics in advance by remarking: “Those who are strongly wedded to what I shall call ‘the classical theory,’ will fluctuate, I expect, between a belief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I am saying nothing new.”

HH

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Henry Hazlitt

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When I wrote The Failure of the “New Economics,” in 1959, I nourished the hope that a theorem-by-theorem analysis of the Keynesian fallacies, as they were stated in the words of the Master himself, might at last shake the Keynesians out of their dogmatic slumber. I ought to have known better. If they could keep remumbling their clichés and incantations for nearly a quarter of a century, in total disregard of the failure of their medicine to lead to anything but more government controls and perpetual inflation, it was naive to expect that a mere theoretical analysis would lead them to do any fresh thinking.

Their instinct for self-preservation had led them, in fact, to work out over the years a defensive technique precisely designed to protect them from the necessity of re-examining their assumptions or their logic. The essence of that technique was to dismiss all critics of Keynes on the ground that the poor fellows were just incapable of understanding the Master’s profundities. Keynes himself prepared this line of defense at the very beginning. In the Preface to his General Theory he endeavored to ridicule or intimidate his critics in advance by remarking: “Those who are strongly wedded to what I shall call ‘the classical theory,’ will fluctuate, I expect, between a belief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I am saying nothing new.”