Public Debt and the Corruption of Contract: Can the Keynesian Cancer Be Excised?
26 Pages Posted: 20 Feb 2017
Date Written: February 18, 2017
Abstract
The Keynesian revolution rationalized a divergence between political and economic rationality. Prior to the Keynesian revolution, divergences between political and commercial practice were held in check by moral beliefs to the effect that good conduct for governments was similar to good conduct for families. After the Keynesian revolution, it became widely believed that standards of goodness relevant for families did not apply to governments, for, indeed, government should often act in pursuit of contrary standards. In consequence, the very notion of contract as promise became corrupted through political practice. That corruption was aided by transmutation of the implicit model of economic life latent within the population from that of a structure of production to that of a wheel of income. By corrupting the language of contract as promise, public debt has become a source of societal cancer within a system of liberal democracy, under the presumption that cancers emerge from within the body politic.
Keywords: contract as promise; cooperative vs. monopolistic democracy; formal vs. practical rationality; structure of production; wheel of income; Antonio de Viti de Marco; James Buchanan; Jane Jacobs
JEL Classification: D72, E62, H63, P16
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation