How one economist singlehandly delivered America into enemy hands

Seventy years ago, on February 4, 1936, the English economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) published what soon became his most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Few books, in so short a time, have gained such wide influence and generated so destructive an impact on public policy. What Keynes succeeded in doing was to provide a rationale for what governments always like to do: spend money and pander to special interests.

In the process Keynes helped undermine what had been three of the essential institutional ingredients of a free-market economy: the gold standard, balanced gov­ernment budgets, and open competitive markets. In their place Keynes’s legacy has given us paper-money inflation, government deficit spending, and more politi­cal intervention throughout the market.

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