Thomas Woods has this outstanding piece debunking the mythical magic of Keynesian policy being forced down America's throat. Here's a slice:
The primary fallacy of the tooth-fairy economics at the heart of the stimulus is
the very idea that economic health is the product of government spending, which
is financed either by borrowing (which leaves private businesses with a smaller
share of the pool of savings for them to borrow from), printing money out of
thin air, or direct seizure from the population. Whatever government spends the
money on is necessarily arbitrary — government lacks the profit-and-loss
feedback mechanism that keeps the private sector from squandering resources and
employing factors of production in ways that do not cater to consumer wants. It
can seize its resources from the people without their consent, and it makes no
difference to government whether or not people actually want or wind up using
the things it produces. Meanwhile, the economy loses the goods that would have
been produced by the voluntary sector had the government not seized these
resources for its own use.
the very idea that economic health is the product of government spending, which
is financed either by borrowing (which leaves private businesses with a smaller
share of the pool of savings for them to borrow from), printing money out of
thin air, or direct seizure from the population. Whatever government spends the
money on is necessarily arbitrary — government lacks the profit-and-loss
feedback mechanism that keeps the private sector from squandering resources and
employing factors of production in ways that do not cater to consumer wants. It
can seize its resources from the people without their consent, and it makes no
difference to government whether or not people actually want or wind up using
the things it produces. Meanwhile, the economy loses the goods that would have
been produced by the voluntary sector had the government not seized these
resources for its own use.
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