“Modern” economics is essentially a flight from economic law, a frantic attempt to find some loophole, some escape hatch into a Cloud- Cuckoo-Land where rivers are filled with lemonade, and you can have your cake and eat it too. In the thirties, Keynes insisted that a world where unemployment existed reversed natural law. But after World War II, unemployment was no longer a problem, and economists were faced with the chilling prospect of returning to “classical” economics and, heaven help us, even laissez-faire. The human mind, however, is almost infinitely inventive in the pursuit of fallacy, and so the next fashionable step was the birth and flowering of still another “new” economics: the “economics of underdeveloped countries.”
The Keynesian war cry had been: well, laissez-faire may have been all well and good in the old days at the beginning of the capitalist system; but in our modern complex economy, extensive government control is clearly necessary. Now, a new slogan was advanced: free enterprise may be all well and good for advanced countries, but the underdeveloped countries must have comprehensive government planning and heaps of American aid (governmental). We are left to wonder at precisely what point we are permitted free enterprise: when is the economy complex enough but not too complex?
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