I believe that one can infer economics is not a science from the mere fact that diverse opinions exist among equally intelligent and erudite men (and presumably women, although I know of no major female economists).
In point of fact, I believe it is not only possible to be a complete idiot in the field of economics, but that this is the most common condition. Look at our current state of affairs. If we were to evaluate our economic situation through the lens of private enterprise, it is in horrible shape. Our balance sheets are filled with debt, our assets are shrinking, and revenues are shrinking as well. We carry on through hard work, creativity, and the sheer tenacity borne of necessity.
Consider Keynes. It is quite possible to paint him as a socialist. He was a member of the Bloomsbury group (where he was a bisexual), and palled around with Fabians.
No one can be so stupid as to miss the fact that deficit spending in the present leads to taxes in the future: in actual taxes, interest payments, and inflation. Thus, you are borrowing, at a disadvantage, money from the future, and using it to fund, today, enterprises which will not be self sustaining, which will not move an inch once the money is gone. This is absolute idiocy, yet trillions of dollars have gone and continue to go into such projects. During the Great Depression, it literally would have cost less simply to pay unemployment than to build the roads and bridges they did.
What such “Keynsian” spending DOES do, however, is discourage private enterprise. Who creates sustainable jobs, in ANY economy? The private sector. If you have no private sector–as in Communist nations–you have no real jobs, and no wealth. You sink into poverty almost immediately. If you like, it might be useful to think of Cuba as a nation that went into a Great Depression, and never exited.
In our own case, FDR did NOTHING to build the faith and trust of private enterprise, and virtually everything in his power–including exorbitant, ridiculous tax rates–to discourage it.
“Keynsian” economics is good at moving capital from the private sector to the public sector, with all the shift in political power that implies.
And when one considers that what the IMF does internationally is implement Keynsian spending in developing nations by loaning the money (which we financed with deficit spending) which is used to build things like dams and highways, you realize that perhaps Keynes was no fool in economics; he was a fool in politics, for thinking any good could come from squelching the desires of individuals the world over for political freedom, and economic self reliance.
I am often tempted to pretend that the horrors of Communism never happened. The history is so nauseating that it is quite impossible for me to see any possible motivation other than garden variety sadism. Millions killed, for the rest to live in chains under tyrannical despots.
Yet, for the same reason one cannot reject this history–patently, it happened–I cannot reject out of hand that all of the negative consequences that flow, inevitably and invariably, from implementing the supposedly “counter-cyclical” (where the “cycle” itself is a function of fiat money) policies of government make-work projects, were not precisely those intended by Keynes himself. He was–along with Soviet agent Harry Dexter White–a “fountainhead” of the bad ideas that flowed from Bretton Woods, and which went on to cause so much hunger, poverty, despotism, and terror.
Can one not accede some merit to the Christian idea that this world is ruled by forces of darkness? It does sometimes seem that way. Still, we all get a voice, don’t we? We know the terrors of history must, in some infinite expanse of time, end. Perhaps one is even justified in hoping it will be sooner rather than later.