Keynesianism Quotes

“There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism

“Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.”
― Ronald Reagan

“There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian”
― Murray N Rothbard

“The General Theory was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, Keynes, the Man

“The general economic growth of the quarter of a century that followed World War II not surprisingly created many illusions. In the West, people thought that they had found in Keynesianism the definitive solution to the problem of crises and unemployment. It was thus thought that the world had entered into an era of perpetual prosperity and definitive mastery of the business cycle. In the socialist world, it was also thought that the model formula for even higher growth had been discovered which enabled Khruschev to announce victoriously that by 1980 the USSR would have overtaken the united States "in every domain." In the third world of Africa and Asia, the national liberation movements which had seized political independence, also had a battery of prescriptions which, in a mix of capitalist and socialist recipes, in doses that varied from case to case, would enable these movements to overcome "underdevelopment" in "interdependence.”
― Samir Amin

“Weintraub was an excellent student of both microtheory as well as Keynes’s General Theory.”
― Paul Davidson

“Not every paradox is correct just because it is a paradox. And what may be an interesting and intriguing mental exercise for specialists who are certain never to lose the firm ground of common sense and fundamental economic insight, becomes irritating and misleading heresy when swallowed whole by minor minds and fanatics.”
― L. Albert Hahn, The Economics of Illusion

“In fact, I sometimes think Keynes wrote his book with his tongue in his cheek. He was doubtless often surprised at the seriousness with which his colleagues took his theses. And if to all this one should remark that I am incapable of grasping the Keynesian intricacies, I would have to console myself with what an old Berlin banker said to an apprentice who was desperate because he was unable to comprehend what a client had written: "Young man, if you are not able to understand his letter, it is probably because it is not understandable.”
― L. Albert Hahn, The Economics of Illusion