Tag: Keynes

Autarky Sure Looks Good

On August 7, 2025

So, Trump has decided to raise tariffs on India to 50% (who knows if he actually will), over their imports of Russian oil. Meanwhile:

Senators Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, and Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal are the lead sponsors of a bipartisan bill which would impose primary and secondary sanctions against Russia and entities supporting Putin’s aggression if Moscow does not engage in peace talks or undermines Ukraine’s sovereignty.

The bill includes imposing 500-percent tariffs on imported goods from countries that buy Russian oil, gas, uranium and other products.

At this point all smart nations and blocs should be doing their best to reduce vulnerability to the US, to route around it and to move towards as much autarky as possible.

It’s notable that while China remains a huge trading power, the #1 economic priority over the last eight years has been making all major industrial stacks domestic: ending their need for industrial goods from other countries and reducing their need for imports of resources. Where that’s not possible, they have shifted to reliable partners like Russia and Iran and various other nations in Asia, Africa and South America.

John Maynard Keynes was of the opinion that anything a country needed, it should make or grow at home if at all feasible. Price arguments are largely ludicrous, because if you don’t have vast exposure to trade or need to buy important goods overseas and you don’t allow significant currency movements outside your border, prices are largely a domestic matter. That is to say, they are a matter of policy. Government actions largely determine the price of goods and services produced in the country IF the country is capable of producing those goods and services itself.

Or, again, as Keynes said, “anything we can do, we can afford.” (The corollary is that anything you can’t do, you can’t afford.)

Trade dependency is foolish. It may be necessary in some cases, and certain policy choices require it, like export driven industrialization. But once you’ve got an industrial base, it becomes a choice.

If a country produces everything it needs, including reasonable luxuries, questions of employment become ludicrous. Just reduce working hours to 30 hours a week, or even 20, or institute an annual income. The idea that resources must be distributed thru jobs is, again, ludicrous. Once a society produces enough why not increase leisure? Why not encourage citizens to do art, write, study or even sun-bathe? Most people don’t have jobs they’d keep doing if they were independently wealthy. There is NO virtue to work that is not actually needed.

A trade structure which creates a vast web of interdependency doesn’t decrease the likelihood of war. The Europeans found that out in WWI: the pre-Great War world had vast amounts of trade, and it was argued that war between the Great Powers was obsolete: they would all lose massively. It was true that they’d all lose massively, and they still went to war.

All that too much interdependence does is restrain nation decision making ability, and, in democratic countries, the ability of politicians to actually do what their constituents want. (They often don’t consider this a bug, mind you. It’s nice to be able to say “we have to reduce taxes on rich people and corporations to be competitive”.)

Free trade is a bad idea for any country that isn’t postage stamp sized. If you can’t make it yourself, learn how. Trade for what you can’t grow or dig up yourself, and actually need. Eat seasonally.

This doesn’t mean “no trade”, it simply means managed trade and an emphasis on making as much as you can yourself.

Certainly no country which can avoid it should need to import food, and likewise and deep need to import energy is a huge weakness which can easily be used against you and which can lead to war. (This is the proximate cause of Japan attacking the US in WWII: America cut Japan off from oil, and they had to have it.)

This also leads back to our previous discussions on population levels and birth rates. A China with 1.4 billion people needs more imports than one with 600 billion people. An American with 150 million people is far freer than one with over 300 million.

As for defense, well, all real countries should have nukes and advanced missiles. It’s that simple. If you do, you’re a real country. If you don’t, you aren’t and are subject to easy blackmail by any great power.

Moving towards autarky is a worthwhile goal. In most cases it will never be achieved and full autarky is rarely a good idea, but getting close is.

(See also, “Ricardo’s Caveat”, because economists are wrong about comparative advantage in free capital flow systems.)

If you’ve read this far, and you read a lot of this site’s articles, you might wish to Subscribe or donate. The site has over over 3,500 posts, and the site, and Ian, take money to run.

At a Societal Level “Can’t Afford” Is Bullshit

By Ian Welsh

On July 27, 2023

Comments

John Maynard Keynes – “Anything we can do, we can afford.”

Money tells you how much of society’s resources you can command. Can you use that building, that land or that person?

It’s more than that, of course, but this is its most fundamental use.

But we are all familiar with the fact that often there are empty buildings, unemployed people and land which is not being used productively. We also know that often what people, land and buildings are being used to do is a bad: a net negative.

99% of Wall Street, for just one example. 85% of the US military, for a second.

We use money so much that we forget that it’s only a proxy. What matters is the actual resources: do we have enough, epople, land, buildings, oil, steel, and other resources to do something or can we get the resources we need, either by moving people and other resources away from bad stuff to good stuff, or by creating more resources.

If we have enough or can create enough or can redistribute enough resources, we can do that thing, whatever it is. The limit isn’t money, the limit is actual, real resources.

Estimates of bullshit jobs are at about 40% or so. I’d personally put it higher: jobs that either are pointless or actively harmful are the majority of what we do.

We can do plenty, any time we really, as societies, want to.

There will come a time, and that time is not so distant, where we can’t. Where real and painful decisions will have to be made, but we are still, in most of the developed world, in a surplus situation, with a lot of resources mis-allocated. Reallocate them and we can fix many of our problems and mitigate almost all the rest, while actually improving human and animal welfare massively.

“Afford” is a word for people, not a word for governments who can print money. For them, the question is “does the country have the resources and can they be mobilized?”

We can make the world and ourselves better when we want to, at least for now.

This is a donor supported site, so if you value the writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

When Keynesian Stimulus Works

By Ian Welsh

On March 9, 2015

Comments

John Maynard Keynes, 1933

It has become fashionable in many circles to denigrate Keynes and Keynesianism because unconventional monetary policy hasn’t worked.

I’m not going to mince words, people who make that argument are idiots. Unconventional monetary policy is not Keynesian stimulus.

Keynesian stimulus is about widespread demand: giving money to rich people is not Keynesian stimulus. The government spends, or even just gives money to people to increase their spending.

Unconventional monetary policy is not Keynesian stimulus.

Further, Keynesian stimulus only works where there aren’t supply bottlenecks. If you were to do (actual) Keynesian stimulus today it wouldn’t work, because oil would rocket past $150/barrel and the economy would immediately collapse.

Keynes did not concentrate on this issue because it wasn’t a problem in his time period: the world, and more importantly, the world’s keystone economy, America, was awash with the stuff. It wasn’t a bottleneck. The only bottleneck, before the US went off gold, was the gold-standard.

The bottleneck issue is also relevant to sinks and renewable resources: spending money indiscriminately in a way which leads to more commercial fishing, say, would be moronic, given collapsing fish stocks. Spending it in ways which lead to vastly more carbon or methane would also be idiotic.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)

We are facing challenges Keynes did not, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t right, that means that the policies he suggested need to be modified for the changing times. If you cannot do so, you do not understand either Keynes, or your own time.

This is the great problem with the work of the great political philosophers; of the sages: they come up with a solution specific to a time, and fools think that it should be applied verbatim for all of time, while other fools think “if it doesn’t work verbatim, it’s all crap.” Doing Keynesian stimulus would be simple, if it was desired. You just make sure the money gets to ordinary people and is used to reduce carbon emissions and uses of other bottleneck resources, while making sure that money doesn’t pool at the top. (Stopping money pooling at the top is mostly a solved problem. Start with 90% tax rates on all income over 1 or 2 million or so, close loopholes, and don’t privilege any income.)

But Keynesian stimulus hasn’t been done, either smart or stupid: not even the widespread demand part has been done. So people who rag on about “Keynesianism” are ragging on about a straw man: a policy which has not even been pursued.

Keynes wouldn’t have any problem prescribing solutions for today’s economic problems, and neither should anyone who understands his work. And those who deride Keynesianism either don’t understand it, or don’t actually want to see widespread prosperity.