Harold MacMillan Quotes

Economics departments are dominated by Marxism, which is taken straight or on the rocks, in the form of Keynesianism.

I am not a monetarist, and I am not a Keynesian. On certain points I agree with each.

I'm happy to say I am a Harrison-Kreps-Keynesian.

Washington office-holders pontificating on markets, taxes, and monetary policy are usually repeating the ideas of some dead economist, often one of whom the orator had no inkling.

The Keynesian idea is once again accepted that fiscal policy and deficit spending has a major role to play in guiding a market economy. I wish Friedman were still alive so he could witness how his extremism led to the defeat of his own ideas.

I don't think Keynesian Monetarism has to be Democrat or Republican.

There is an unearthly, mystical element in Friedman's thought. The mere existence of a stock of money somehow promotes expenditure. But insofar as he offers an intelligible theory, it is made up of elements borrowed from Keynes.

First, I think the science of monetary economics has clearly gotten better.

At the time, my personal research objectives were to provide Keynesian economics with more rigorous foundations and to tighten and elaborate the logic of macroeconomic and monetary theory.

I didn't wake up one day and say, you know, 'Supply-side economics doesn't make sense.'

It's pointless to talk to Fed members about economics because they are academics who believe in money-printing. Some of them believe they didn't print enough, and so with these kinds of people, it is like running to the pope. What do you want to tell them?

The Chicago Economics Department was in intellectual ferment, although the central issues of the 1930's were very different from those in later times. I had never before encountered minds of that quality at close quarters and they influenced me strongly.

Is supply-side economics finished? Only in the sense that General George S. Patton's army was finished in Germany in May, 1945.

We are all Keynesians now.

Until Keynes, politicians had not needed economists for help in running the country any more than they had needed astronomers. But Keynes made them indispensible.

What a surprise. Economists disagree.

Supply creates its own demand

We used to think that we could spend our way out of a recession…. I tell you in all candor that that opinion no longer exists.

Supply can create its own demand.

'The General Theory' was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.

I'm a big fan of economist Milton Freidman.

Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor.

The modern history of economic theory is a tale of evasions of reality.

For better or worse, US Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian. You know what a cafeteria catholic is?

Keynesians are to economics what witch doctors are to medicine.