Shockingly Entertaining: Friedrich Hayek Vs John Maynard Keynes Rap

By Rocky Vega

12/20/09 Stockholm, Sweden – Russell Roberts, a professor of economics at George Mason University, argues for the Friedrich Hayek perspective, and against Keynesian government spending, in an episode of PBS NewsHour featured below. He directly counters the mainstream John Maynard Keynes viewpoint forwarded in this clip by Lord Robert Skidelsky, the author of a new book with the unfortunate title, “Keynes: The Return of the Master.”

Master…? Perhaps the master of deficit spending.

Here’s a highlight from the episode:

NewsHour Economics Correspondent Paul Solman: “Government has to protect the economy from itself, Keynes thought. But Roberts thinks markets, unprotected, do a better job.“

Russ Roberts: “What markets do is they punish you if you systematically make the same mistakes over and over again. When you destroy the punishment system that markets naturally perform you’re going to see more myopia, more hubris, more overconfidence.”

See the Keynes rap post at Naked Capitalism or view the video below.

Rocky Vega

Rocky Vega is a regular contributor to The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.

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