Announcement of death was premature

As Karm Farrugia said (March7), Keynes really "revolutionised" economics.

Years ago Dudley Dillard, an American economist, wrote: "Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, in the eighteenth century, is a ringing challenge to mercantilism, Karl Marx's Capital is a searching criticism of capitalism and Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) is a repudiation of the foundations of laissez-faire."

It was laissez-faire capitalism that was responsible for the Great Depression of the 1930s and no less responsible for the present deep recession, likewise originating in the USA, that is now engulfing the West. What is more depressing is that the process in the present case differs in no essential respect from the process of roulette or casino capitalism.

Incidentally, in a leader headed Time To Bury Keynes, The Economist of July 3, 1993, wrote: "Once upon a time, a government would have responded to such an unhappy prospect (unemployment) with a dose of good old-fashioned Keynesian medicine."

Is not the US now resorting to "good old-fashioned Keynesian medicine" against high unemployment as well as bailing out, with public money, the culprits responsible for the deep recession so as to revive the American economy? It is no coincidence that The Economist concluded the mentioned leader: "In the long run, quipped Keynes, we are all dead. But now, as others have quipped about the borrowing that Keynes inspired, we are in the long-run, and Keynes is dead."

So Keynes is dead, eh? Why, then, are governments in America and Europe applying "good old-fashioned medicine" without calling it Keynesian as if they are ashamed to do so? Why don't they rely on the neoliberalism which they have so gladly embraced? The reason undoubtedly and unmistakably is that Keynesian fundamentalism is still the only sure means for dealing effectively with a deep recession.

It is astonishing that many American economists consider Keynes a socialist or with socialist leanings. They should have long known what Keynes wrote in his 1925 Essays in Persuasion, p. 324.

In listing his objections to joining the Labour Party, Keynes wrote: "To begin with it is (not now) a class party, and the class is not my class. If I am going to pursue sectional interests at all, I shall pursue my own. When it comes to the class struggle as such, my local and personal patriotisms ... are attached to my surroundings. I can be influenced by what seems to me to be Justice and good sense; but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie." (Quote in The Economics of J.M. Keynes by Dudley Dillard, p. 319). By "Justice", one thinks, Keynes may have meant "social justice".