John Maynard Keynes, who should be burning in Hell for his shyster economic theories, is largely responsible for our current looming apocalypse.
His theory basically is that only demand, made more real than just wishing for things by creating fiat money and credit, is important, since in his myopic, context-dropping theory, people produce a supply when there is a demand.
(That they’d want the money they are paid to be valuable enough to buy someone else’s products he neglects to envision.)
His theory was refuted by F.A. Hayek at the time. But politicians usually ignored the refutations, since they saw a way of expanding their power and budgets while using a bit of Cambridge University produced con artistry as cover. Politicians are the first ones to get to spend new fiat currency and credits, deciding which donors, cronies, businesses, organizations will get it, before it causes inflation and reduces the purchasing power of the currency in general. It allows a constant redistribution of wealth to whoever controls the printing press and those nearest to them.
Keynes is also famous for saying:
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
Once again he is wrong.
We are currently being pushed even faster toward disaster, not just by his voodoo macroeconomics, and not by the ideas of dead economists, but of a deceased sociologist.
The sociologists in question are a husband and wife team, the late Richard Cloward and his wife Francis Fox Piven (still with us at 92), professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, which the couple first published in the socialist magazine The Nation, sought to bring change out of chaos. The idea was that social workers and other government employees and leftist groups (Ms. Piven was on the board of Democratic Socialists of America) would cajole anyone they could to apply for every government assistance program, until the welfare state was so overloaded it broke down, which would lead, they thought, to the institution of a “free” minimum guaranteed income for every American.
Whether this would have worked or not, subsequent strategists on the left clearly decided to expand it by importing poor people from anywhere in the third world.