Era of Secular Stimulus

THE TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS SPENT to ease the economic pain of the pandemic has commentators marveling that “we are all Keynesians now.” But the current spending is a gross distortion of what that famous proponent of government stimulus, the economist John Maynard Keynes, recommended during the Great Depression nearly a century ago.

The prevailing view before Keynes was that the government should let nature run its course. That approach had worked over the preceding