Whose policies have worked really?

I posted below on the theories of John Maynard Keynes in juxtaposition to those of Adam Smith... Today if we break down and simplify the Democratic and Republican parties' economic/fiscal policies, we can see the followers of Keynes in Democrats and followers of Smith in Republicans... But it is very instructive to view the history and find out more whose policies really worked... The Gilded Age in America that was completely and fully energized by Smith's policies lead to the destruction and the Great Depression... and it was only John Maynard Keynes' policies implemented by Roosevelt that took the country out of that disaster... And this is only one of the many examples in history... Just take a moment to look back... Bill Clinton following the general ethos of liberal Democratic fiscal policies left the Office with a thriving economy, unprecedented budget surplus and the lowest unemployment and inflation rates ever in the U.S. history. How this success story was thrown out of the board in these last 8 years is lamentable...

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease ... But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

[John Maynard Keynes]

Lowell and Gilded Age America

Josephine Shaw Lowell (1843-1905) was one of the most remarkable women figures in the late nineteenth century, much better known as the Gilded Age in American history. Born into a wealthy New England family, she dedicated her life to eradicating poverty. A Progressive Reform leader, she established the New York Consumers' League in 1890, which strove to improve the wages and working conditions of women workers in New York City. Founder of many charitable organizations, she said, "If the working people had all they ought to have, we should not have the paupers and criminals. It is better to save them before they go under, than to spend your life fishing them out afterward." The Gilded Age certainly reminded of the Dickens' England-- unregulated and exorbitant wealth side by side with complete and irremediable poverty... For more on the biography of this remarkable woman see the scholarly work of Professor Joan Waugh at UCLA (here).