I saw this image posted on Facebook:
I left the following comment in reply:
Ha! Said the preeminent crony capitalist, whose economic theories underpin our existing financial system, under which we are supposed to hold the extraordinary belief that legislators and Fed officials are the wisest of men who for the most benevolent of motives work for the benefit of all, when the truth is their attempts at centrally planning the economy through the use of force serve the interests of the banks, the government, and its cronies, effecting a transfer of wealth upward and inflicting upon us the cycle of booms and busts and all its disastrous consequences.
That's one of the wonderful things about a free market -- individuals acting for their own best interests and with the profit motive choose to serve other individuals, the consumers, by providing them with goods or services, the demand for which is satisfied through voluntary exchange for mutual benefit.
Of course, the person who posted this wasn't wittingly endorsing the cronyism that Keynes represented. Rather, the quote just fit in well with her own socialist beliefs. It is ironic how socialists, in their anti-free market fervor and advocacy of ever more government central planning, in effect help to perpetuate the existing crony capitalist system, the consequences of which they then blame on the free market in order to call for even more central planning, and so on.
Here's a far more apt quote from Frederich Bastiat's The Law (which I highly recommend; click here to get the paperback, or click here to download it now for your Kindle for only $0.99):
Socialists desire to practice legal plunder, not illegal plunder. Socialists, like all other monopolists, desire to make the law their own weapon. And when once the law is on the side of socialism, how can it be used against socialism? For when plunder is abetted by the law, it does not fear your courts, your gendarmes, and your prisons. Rather, it may call upon them for help.
Join the discussion on my Facebook page by liking it here. And if you want to learn more about how government central planning -- not the free market -- caused the housing bubble, you'll want to check out my book Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis, about which none other than Barron's had this to say: "This short work conveys more insight into the causes and cures of business cycles than most textbooks, and more about the recent business cycle than most volumes of much greater length."
