Peter Drucker: “KEYNES ASKED the same questions that Ricardo, Mill, Marx, the “Austrians” and Marshall had asked but, with unprecedented audacity, turned every one of the answers upside down. In the Keynesian system, money and credit are “real,” and goods and services dependent on, and shadows of, the “symbol economy”; the macro-economy, the economy of the nation-state, is everything, with individuals and firms having neither power to influence, let alone to direct, the economy nor the ability to make effective decisions counter to the forces of the “macro-economy”; and economic phenomena, capital formation, productivity and employment are functions of demand.
”By now we know, as Schumpeter knew 50 years ago, that every one of these Keynesian answers is the wrong answer. At least they are valid only for special cases and within fairly narrow ranges. Take, for instance, Keynes’ key theorem: that monetary events — government deficits, interest rates, credit volume and volume of money in circulation — determine demand and with it economic conditions. This assumes — as Keynes himself stressed — that the turnover velocity of money is constant and not capable of being changed over the short term by individuals or firms. Schumpeter pointed out 50 years ago that all evidence negates this assumption. And indeed, whenever tried, Keynesian economic policies, whether in the original Keynesian or in the modified Friedman version, have been defeated by the “micro-economy” of businesses and individuals, unpredictably and without warning, changing the turnover velocity of money almost overnight.
“WHEN THE KEYNESIAN PRESCRIPTIONS were initially tried — in the U.S. in the early New Deal days — they seemed at first to work. But then, around 1935 or so, consumers and businesses suddenly sharply reduced the turnover velocity of money with-in a few short months, which aborted a recovery based on government deficit spending and brought about a second collapse of the stock market in 1937. The best example, however, is what happened in this country in the last few years. The Federal Reserve’s purposeful attempt to control the economy by controlling money supply has largely been defeated by consumers and businesses who suddenly and almost violently shifted deposits from thrifts into money market funds and from long-term investments into liquid assets — that is, from low-velocity into high-velocity money — to the point where no one can really tell any more what the “money supply” is or ever what the term means. Individuals and businesses seeking to optimize their self-interest and guided by their perception of economic reality will always find a way to beat the “system” — whether, as in the Soviet bloc, through converting the entire economy into one gigantic black market or, as in the U.S. in the last few years, through transforming the financial system overnight despite laws, regulations or economists.
”This does not mean that economics is likely to return to pre-Keynesian neoclassicism. Keynes’ critique of the neoclassic answers is as definitive as Schumpeter’s critique of Keynes. But because we now that individuals can and will defeat the system, we have lost the certainty that Keynes imposed on economics and that has made the Keynesian system the lodestar of economic theory and economic policy for 50 years. Both Friedman’s monetarism and supply-side economics are desperate attempts to patch up the Keynesian system of equilibrium economics. But it is unlikely that either can restore the self-contained, self-confident equilibrium economics, let alone an economic theory or an economic policy in which one factor, whether government spending, interest rates, money supply or tax cuts, controls the economy predictably and with near-certainty.”
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