Reply #4: Here is some more info

[RUexperienced]

from Bruce Bartlett:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/brucebartlett/bb20040116.shtml

At first glance, I thought Cockburn was totally off base. But as I looked into it, I found that respected academics have long drawn analogies between the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, generally considered the most important economist of the 20th century, and the economic policies of Nazi Germany.

For example, an article in the April 1975 issue of the prestigious Journal of Political Economy points out that German economists in the early 1930s were well aware of Keynes' work and were developing theories along parallel lines. These involved the now familiar prescription for economic depressions of large budget deficits, public works programs and easy credit.

A July 1992 article in the journal Explorations in Economic History found that German fiscal policy stopped being restrictive and turned "Keynesian" as soon as Hitler took power. Government spending increased almost immediately, helping to pull Germany out of the depression while America and Britain still maintained restrictive fiscal policies.

Furthermore, it turns out that Keynes' greatest admirers have long maintained that Hitler's economic policies were indeed Keynesian. In a lecture to the American Economic Association's annual meeting in 1971, economist Joan Robinson, a close colleague of Keynes, said, "Hitler had already found how to cure unemployment before Keynes had finished explaining why it occurred."

In 1977, John Kenneth Galbraith, the famous Harvard economist, wrote in his book, "The Age of Uncertainty," that Hitler "was the true protagonist of the Keynesian ideas."

Keynes himself even explained that his theories were not incompatible with national socialism. In the forward to the German edition of his book, "The General Theory" (1936), Keynes wrote that "the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than ... under conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire."