John Maynard Keynes has never been so popular. The name of this world famous British economist, who died in 1946, is on everyone’s lips these days, including Gordon Brown’s.

However, Keynes’s ideas are often misrepresented, or misunderstood, by both Left and Right in politics.

The Left believes his economic strictures are for all occasions, when they were proposed for slump conditions only. The Right thinks his views were Marxist and should never soil their delicate monetarist palette.

In fact Keynes had a lot to say about monetary policy. His flaw is that he was too broad brush on inflation, even appearing to brush it away.

Roger Bootle of Capital Economics has written an excellent summary-for-dummies on Keynes and Keynesianism in the UK’s Daily Telegraph.

Read it here

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That seems to be a choice that has to be made by each succeeding generation, depending on the business cycle and/or the severity of downturns.

In the current recessionary period the situation is so bad it’s become a crisis in both the financial markets and the real economy. Already many governments are having to nationalize part or all of their banking system. Financial services never seemed so brittle.

Is that really the case though? In a carefully-argued article, The world needs Up-To-A-Pointism, John Evans suggests that by staying within the boundaries where governments and free markets work best, the world would be a much more stable place to live and do business.

Although mostly mutually-exclusive, the interface between regulation and free markets could be made to operate more efficiently, to the benefit of both.