Thanks to the Roosevelt Recession, in the spring of 1938 the New Deal's "Keynesians" finally found themselves in the saddle, displacing the planners, reformers, and trust-busters whose legislative efforts had petered out some months before. The Keynesians' rise was symbolized by the $3 billion spending program FDR…
(Previous installments of "The Keynesian Myth" are here and here.) Balancing Act As Richard Adelstein (1991, p. 177) observes, far from taking Keynes's advice that he ratchet-up the federal government's deficit spending, "Roosevelt held fast to the ideal of a balanced budget and remained the chief opponent…
(The first installment of "The Keynesian Myth" is here.) All-American Money Makers Although conventional wisdom has it that Keynes considered government spending far more capable of ending the depression than monetary expansion, that certainly wasn't his view in 1931: during lectures he gave then at the University…
(The first of an essay in 3 installments.) In The Money Makers, his 2015 book on the New Deal and its aftermath, Eric Rauchway says that FDR "conducted an active monetary and fiscal program of recovery…working along lines suggested by Keynes." His book's subtitle in turn declares…
"This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. …[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself." —FDR, in his first inaugural address. "There is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain."—Thomas Hobbes, on the state of…