Kates at Freedomfest

Stephen Kates is in the US:

I am at the Freedomfest here in Las Vegas which is a confluence of all of the Conservative-Republican-Libertarian and generally free market groupings in the United States. It is like going to a Quadrant dinner only times 50 in numbers. It is an unbelievable pleasure to be amongst it, and as an invited speaker as well.

My paper is tomorrow on “Keynesian Economics: the Beginning of the End?” The question mark only reflects my pessimism. We went to see the magician Lance Burton today but there is no escape artist in the history of magic as slithery as Keynes was in economics. No failure, no theoretical idiocy, no evidence of any kind seems to be able to undermine the hold that Keynes has on economic thought. We shall see if he escapes again, but this is like Houdini welded into a milk can and thrown into the middle of the Yarra. He will never get out of this, you say, but we shall see. In no time flat we shall see Maynard Keynes again rise to the surface as if nothing had happened and economics will go on as if the American economy had also floated to the surface without a hitch.

…

Anyway, here at Freedomfest people do know what I am talking about. As for whether this is the beginning of the end or even the end of the beginning for Keynesian economics, of this I have no idea. There are many many stupid ideas that become mainstream and stay there, seemingly forever. This may just be another one. But really, it is time that Krugman and those other Keynesians put up a test of some kind so that the rest of us can see when it is not actually working, even in their own eyes. If this is a Keynesian success story, what does failure look like? 

Source: Catallaxy Files