This taken from a 2011 paper written by Robert Sidelsky about Keynes:

“In 1929, with British unemployment standing at 10% of the insured workforce, Keynes and Hubert Henderson wrote a pamphlet entitled Can Lloyd George Do It? (Keynes, 1981). In this they proposed a big programme of public works, to be financed by loan, the idea being to induce a ‘cumulative wave of prosperity’. The British Treasury attempted to refute the proposal using an argument developed by its only economist Ralph Hawtrey. Hawtrey had claimed that, with a fixed money supply, any loan raised by the government for public works would ‘crowd out’ an equivalent amount of private spending. Employment could be increased only by credit expansion—or what was then called inflation. The prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, was fed the lies ‘we must either take existing money or create new money’.

Keynes riposted: ‘Mr. Baldwin has invented the formidable argument that you must not do anything because it means you will not be able to do anything else’. Yet the Treasury argument of 1929 was restated in 2009, in almost identical terms, by Professor John Cochrane of Chicago University: if money is not going to be printed, it has to come from somewhere. If the government borrows a dollar from you, that is a dollar that you do not spend, or that you do not lend to a company to spend on new investment. Every dollar of increased government spending must correspond to one less dollar of private spending. Jobs created by stimulus spending are offset by jobs from the decline of private spending. We can build roads instead of factories, but fiscal stimulus can’t help us to build more of both. (Cochrane, 2009)”

Who knew ? It’s almost like the right and some members of the left just copied from this original material. As my mom used to say: I swanee

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