HCJ2 - Hayek vs Keynes

I found this link. It is very silly, but I think it helps a bit: Keynes vs Hayek. But it did plant the thought that we could far more in the way of making video about HCJ type topics, as we did with the triumphant videoblogs about George Orwell.

Speaking of whom I remembered this excellent video clip of Orwell writing about the role played by military spending in Keynesian economics. It is from the more prosaic parts of 1984. The essence of Keynesianism is the use of state spending to inject cash into the economy by doing essentially useless things which do not otherwise affect the price structure - such as paying people to did holes in the ground and fill them up again, the Space Project and what we are pleased to call 'government waste'. That waste although admitting a completely futile activity, is nevertheless somebody's job, and the money they get for doing it (however pointless) provides income that will then be spent in the shops, thus keeping others employed through Keynes's concept of The Multiplier. The government can't pay people do anything really useful because that would be unfair competition for private firms - hence the howls of protest against the BBC and - in the USA - the protest against spending on an NHS (in the UK the setting up of the NHS detroyed the private sector health industry overnight - it does not exist in the UK anymore and therefore can not be a source of profitable investment. That is the problem that Obama is facing in the US - what can you spend government money providing that is NOT provided by provate companies which can be a source of profits for the private sector. One good thing is war. It costs an absolute fortune, employs a lot of people and does not but private companies out of business (in contrast if the government built houss and gave them away to people, the whole housing and mortgage/banking business would go bust overnight. It is hard to think up things for the government to waste money on. The Space Programme... The Arts Council... New Universities... House Insulation... Old Age Pensions... but these things are politically controversial and those not schooled in the reality of (Keynesian, that is to say modern, economics) while not understand that these projects are mainly ways to injecting money in to the economy and not 'waste' in the way the economic illiterates think. Orwell I think was sensationally prescient as it was written in the 1950s, at the start of what was called The Cold War and decades before the endless, limitless 'war on terror' which justifies world spending on armaments on a vast and recurring scale that makes the government deficits and even bank bail outs look like a round of drinks in the pub:

http://www.youtube.com/user/OceanicIngsoc#p/u/12/sXiA5m3n1qY

Also, a more basic talk about JM Keynes and The Phillips curve: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG56sFoNNa8&feature=related