Shadow Boxing with Keynesianism

… that there may be a supply of commodities in the aggregate surpassing demand … appears to me to involve so much inconsistency in its very conception, that I feel considerable difficulty in giving any statement of it which shall be at once clear, and satisfactory to its supporters.
— John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy

If numbers of patients were to sicken progressively and dreadfully after prolonged medical treatment we might ask whether the treatment was any good. We might even ask whether the treatment was doing more harm than good. That’s medicine. Apparently, the same scrutiny is not applied to the practice of economics. If it were, we might ask how it was possible that many developed economies are suffering from high levels of unemployment; measured, for example, at over 11 per cent across the eighteen-country Eurozone (Lithuania has recently become the nineteenth). And this, so long after the cure for unemployment—injections of government stimulus…