Broadly speaking, Keynesianism means that the government has a specific responsibility for the behavior of the economy, that it doesn't work on its own autonomous course, but the government, when there's a recession, compensates by employment, by expansion of purchasing power, and in boom times corrects by being a restraining force. But it controls the great flow of demand into the economy, what since Keynesian times has been the flow of aggregate demand. That was the basic idea of Keynes so far as one can put it in a couple of sentences.

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

For the sake of The Progressive, I will say that [Robert] La Follette was relevant, but he was the last.

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.

There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.

In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.