Keynes is back! Unfortunately. If you want to make sense of most of the reporting and commentary on the econony these days, you have to realize that most reporters and commentators and politicians are working from the Keynesian position that, as Paul Krugman puts it, “[I]ndividual virtue can be public vice… attempts by consumers to do the right thing by saving more can leave everyone worse off.” This is Keynes’s so-called “Paradox of Thrift.”
From Economics in One Lesson from Henry Hazlitt:
The enemies of saving are not through. They begin by drawing a distinction, which is proper enough, between "savings" and "investment." But then they start to talk as if the two were independent variables and as if it were merely an accident that they should ever equal each other. These writers paint a portentous picture. On the one side are savers automatically, pointlessly, stupidly continuing to save; on the other side are limited "investment opportunities" that cannot absorb this saving. The result, alas, is stagnation. The only solution, they declare, is for the government to expropriate these stupid and harmful savings and to invent its own projects, even if these are only useless ditches or pyramids, to use up the money and provide employment.
Good reading: Visions and Frameworks in Macroeconomics
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