Keynse v Friedman Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Keynse v Friedman - Essay Example A weak aggregate demand could cause unemployment to rise and starts a negative cycle of boom and bust in economics. The general thrust of a government whenever there is a threat of recession is to intervene and use fiscal and monetary tools to mitigate the ill effects of a recession. A key recommendation of Keynes during a down economic cycle was stimulus spending by the government by deficit spending which at first glance is counter-intuitive as it requires spending using money that a government does not have in the first place and might cause inflation and devaluation. If his ideas were adopted earlier, it could have made the Great Depression less severe and shorter. Milton Friedman (1912-2006) is a famous American economist in his own right and he won the coveted Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976 for challenging the ideas of Keynes. In particular, he argued there is always a persistent unemployment that government policies can only reduce to a certain extent. The trick, he argues, is give free market capitalism free rein in promoting jobs and thereby increase in the process the level of aggregate consumption or the so-called aggregate demand of Keynesian economics. He denounced Keynesian economics as as socialism with his famous remark that â€Å"there is no such thing as a free lunch.† He sees government intervention as interference of free markets and a dangerous act (Friedman