Paul Heise couldn’t just write a letter to the editor of the newspaper. By listing his degrees and honorifics in the letter, Heise attempts to establish bona fides so superior to those of his readers that they cannot or, at least, will not question its content. However, when he declares John Maynard Keynes as his intellectual lightship and Milton Friedman to be the root of all economic evil in America, Heise gives himself away.

Keynes is the favorite economist of the left-wing in America and much of Europe. Keynes and Friedman were theoretical antagonists, a struggle Friedman won more than forty years ago and from which victory the few remaining Keynsians of the world have never recovered. Friedman replaced Keynes as the dominant influence on world economics, thankfully for America’s growth and prosperity.

Keynes book "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money" may be considered to have been written in the realm of economics, but it provided intellectual cover for all kinds of ill-advised government meddling and regulation favored by the left during the Great Depression and beyond, even today.

Keynes espoused a moral and political outlook known as social democracy. The inclusion of the “social” construct is not accidental. The economic theory underpinning it presupposed that government had the principal role in running the economy through macroeconomic policy. Keynes was a collectivist, a statist who favored broad, intrusive government and based much of his theory on the philosophies that produced socialism and its totalitarian manifestations. Implicit in his thinking was that the government would be advised (read: guided/controlled) by acceptable elites – eggheads like himself, mostly. We’ve all seen how that worked out in Eastern Europe and in the socialist state paradises of Western Europe today – all teetering on the brink of demographic collapse and receivership.

Liberals and, especially liberal politicians love Keynesian economics because it justifies a dominant role for government. Most of us want government to let us alone, or at least just get out of the way.

Keynes got one thing right that is largely ignored today by the same liberals who worship him. Keynes once observed that “taxation may be so high as to defeat its object,” so that sometimes “a reduction of taxation will run a better chance, than an increase, of balancing the Budget.”

Though it could have been said more recently by Milton Friedman or Arthur B. Laffer, it was said in 1933 by John Maynard Keynes, liberal icon.

Get a clue, Barack Obama! Get a Clue, Edward Rendell! Get a clue, Tim Holden!