General

Re: Best refutation of Keynes?

MatthewWilliam — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:54:08 GMT

Sage:
Dissent on Keynes: A Critical Appraisal of Keynesian Economics, edited by Skousen

The two best chapters of this book are Herbener's Myths of the Multiplier and the Accelerator and Hoppe's The Misesian Case Against Keynes. They make for particularly great reading.

Re: Best refutation of Keynes?

McDuffie — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:39:05 GMT

I haven't studied Keynesianism in any great detail, outside of listening to the lectures I downloaded from mises.org, but I thought that the best refutation of Keynes was the empirical observation that we HAD stagflation in the early and mid seventies, which Keynesianism said was impossible.

Re: Best refutation of Keynes?

Steve Bachman — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:11:36 GMT

Hazlitt's "Failure of the 'New Economics'" is great. I read while on vacation at the beach this past summer. It actually starts out kind of slow, but by the middle Hazlitt really starts tearing into Keynes; I laughed out loud so many times while reading it that I started getting on my wife's nerves.

There's also a nice little book by L. Albert Hahn called "The Economics of Illusion." It's brief and to the point, not as in-depth as Hazlitt's work, but definitely worth reading.

Re: Best refutation of Keynes?

rstruzik — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 21:33:27 GMT

you called?

(haha, had to share)

Re: Best refutation of Keynes?

Jon Irenicus — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:42:51 GMT

Actually, Keynes was very much in line with the classical economists on distribution of wealth. They saw it as arbitrary and disconnected from production. It's modern economists, including Austrians, who repudiated this nonsense.

Hutt, Reisman, Hayek and Rothbard have also written good refutations of Keynes, in the forms of either books or articles (Reisman devotes a section of his Capitalism to Keynes, Rothbard a section of MES.)

Re: Best refutation of Keynes?

eliotn — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:51:00 GMT

I would say that a good refutation of Keynes is to completely refute the idea of GDP, and the national income, which some ideas are based on.

Refute the concept that unemployment is bad, it just means that people don't want to work for the given deal. Of course, unemployment caused by government policy (because it prevents a mutually agreed upon trade) is bad.

Show that the only link between unemployment and inflation is that government can reduce unemployment temporarily by inflating the currency, with disasterous results.

Re: Best refutation of Keynes?

nazgulnarsil — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:03:46 GMT

you don't need a whole book.

the entire thrust of the general theory of money employment and interest is fallacious.

"THE outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes." -chapter 24

that's his reasoning for abandoning classical economics and starting a brave new world of scientism.

it firstly assumes that a healthy economy would have full employment which is completely absurd, of course there will always be some people out of work. secondly that income inequality is a problem. income inequality simply reflects the fact that some people actually are millions of time as productive as others. steve jobs is several million times more productive than an assembly line worker. Keynes was a product of his time. Liberal thought was thrusting inexorably towards the welfare state, and in order to justify redistributionism you have to villify the ultra-productive.

simultaneously vilifying and relying upon the productive member of society, reminds me of a teenager yelling at his parents about how unfair life is. guess what? people aren't equal, tough.

Best refutation of Keynes?

Sage — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:25:06 GMT

General

Re: Best refutation of Keynes?

Re: Best refutation of Keynes?

Re: Best refutation of Keynes?

Re: Best refutation of Keynes?

you called?

(haha, had to share)

Re: Best refutation of Keynes?

Re: Best refutation of Keynes?

Re: Best refutation of Keynes?

Best refutation of Keynes?

Out of these three books, which is the best refutation of Keynes?

The Critics of Keynesian Economics edited by Hazlitt

Dissent on Keynes: A Critical Appraisal of Keynesian Economics, edited by Skousen

Failure of the 'New Economics', by Hazlitt

Or is there something else that's even better?