There is productive consumption and there is non-productive consumption. In the Keynesian mind, it's not necessary to produce anything, so long as people spend and consume endlessly, even to the point of destroying real wealth.
Liberalism conceives of freedom as the absence of constraint, but Hegel's definition is more expansive. And, of course, the state is a necessary condition for it.
In order to remove the threat of secular stagnation what is required is to shrink government outlays and to close all the loopholes for the creation of money out of thin air.
Petrodollars and petrodollar recycling are at the heart of what keeps the US debt and money-printing mechanism going. The geopolitical stakes are very high.
So long as governments exist, it is essential that we minimize the ability of groups and individuals to use the power of the state to enrich themselves.
Henry Ford's factories had a hard time keeping workers because the work was monotonous. So Ford helped keep workers around through reduced hours, vacation time, and other benefits that are now considered typical.
Hunter-gatherer societies stripped the local environment of resources and then moved on to another place. There was nothing environmentally responsible about this sort of economy, in spite of modern efforts to portray prehistoric humans as tree huggers.
Economic history is possible only because there is an economic theory capable of throwing light upon economic actions. If there were no economic theory, reports concerning economic facts would be nothing more than a collection of unconnected data open to any arbitrary interpretation.
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