There are certain names that echo down from the history of finance and economics. Adam Smith is one. Milton Friedman is another. So does the British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes’ was, and famously remains, an advocate of government deficit spending in a recession. It’s hard to imagine now how radical this position was in the decade before the Second World War. Governments were expected to balance their books according to the orthodoxy of the time. You might not have read Keynes’s work, but it doesn’t matter for today’s discussion. You’re literally living in the economy he envisioned. Well, sort of, anyway. ... (full story)