At a United Nations meeting in the year 2000, the world’s governments agreed on the goal of enrolling every child on the planet in primary schooling by 2015. Strangely, this lofty plan does not say anything about the quality of schooling; the whole idea is to get children into government-approved classrooms, apparently regardless of what happens there.
Perhaps the greatest modern champion of central economic planning was the twentieth-century English economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes advocated the idea that the government should play a large, active role in the economy. Among the consequences of Keynes’ economic theories, whether intended or unintended, is the fact that Western economies today are characterized by large, central governments, central banks, and massive debts.
For real life-headlines worthy of The Onion, one needs look no further than the doings of the U.S. government and its agencies. One week after Hurricane Sandy devastated the New York area, with a new storm on the way and almost 10,000 Staten Islanders still without power and scavenging for food, “FEMA Center Closed Due to Bad Weather” hung on the door of a newly-opened Staten Island FEMA office. Ten FEMA offices in the disaster- stricken area actually closed as the second storm hit.
In the beginning of The General Theory, John Maynard Keynes says that his ideas will no doubt be rejected because they are so novel and revolutionary. Toward the end of the same book, he seems to have forgotten this, because now he says he is reviving the same centuries-old ideas that he had once dismissed as the most absurd fallacies. At least he acknowledges that he is changing his position, although he does not explain how his ideas can be new, revolutionary, and also centuries old.
During the 2012 presidential campaign, President Obama made his now famous claim that “you didn’t build that” in reference to the infrastructure that businesses use to provide goods and services to customers.
At the Brink: Will Obama Push Us Over the Edge?
John R. Lott, Jr.
Regnery, 2013, 320 pgs.
