One strong recent trend among economists, businessmen, and politicians, has been to lament the amount of savings and investment in the United States as being far too low. It is pointed out that the American percentage of savings to national income is far lower than among the West Germans, or among our feared competitors, the Japanese. Recently, Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas Brady sternly warned of the low savings and investment levels in the United States.

Establishment historians of economic thought—they of the Smith-Marx-Marshall variety—have a compelling need to end their saga with a chapter on the latest Great Man, the latest savior and final culmination of economic science. The last consensus choice was, of course, John Maynard Keynes, but his General Theory is now a half-century old, and economists have for some time been looking around for a new candidate for that final chapter.

The Keynesians have been caught short again. In the early and the late 1970s, the wind was taken out of their sails by the arrival of inflationary recession, a phenomenon which they not only failed to predict, but whose very existence violates the fundamental tenets of the Keynesian system. Since then, the Keynesians have lost their old invincible arrogance, though they still constitute a large part of the economics profession.

One of the ironic but unfortunately enduring legacies of eight years of Reaganism has been the resurrection of Keynesianism. From the late 1930s until the early 1970s, Keynesianism rode high in the economics profession and in the corridors of power in Washington, promising that, so long as Keynesian economists continued at the helm, the blessings of modern macroeconomics would surely bring us permanent prosperity without inflation. Then something happened on the way to Eden: the mighty inflationary recession of 1973–74.

Most people disagree with economists, who point out the important impact that monetary incentives can have on even seemingly “non-economic” behavior. When, for example, coffee prices rise due to a killing frost of the coffee crop in Brazil, or when New York subway fares go up, most people believe that the quantity purchased will not be affected, since people are “addicted” to coffee, and people “have to get to work” by subway.

The welfare system has become an open scandal, and has given rise to justified indignation throughout the middle and working classes. Unfortunately, as too often happens when the public has no articulate leadership, the focus of its wrath against welfare has become misplaced.

I first heard of the Infant Mortality Question last summer, when I had the misfortune to spend an evening with an obnoxious leftist who claimed that, despite any other considerations, U.S. capitalism had failed and the Soviet Union had succeeded, because of the high “infant mortality” rate here. She must have been ahead of the left-wing learning curve, for since then the press has been filled with articles proclaiming the selfsame doctrine.

Winter is here, and for the last few years this seasonal event has meant the sudden discovery of a brand-new category of the pitiable: the “homeless.”

The little word “but” is the great weasel word of our time, enabling one to subscribe to standard pieties while getting one’s real contrary message across. “Of course, I deplore communism, but . . .”; “Of course, I approve of the free market, but . . .” have been all too familiar refrains in recent decades. The standard reaction of our pundits, and across the entire respectable political spectrum, to the great Los Angeles et al. riots of April 29–May 2 went: “Of course, I can’t condone violence, but . . .