In answer to your earlier question, Omar, I used to be what is termed a Neo-Keynsian in terms of my views on what constituted a viable model for maintaining a reasonable equilibrium for the 'ordinary' person in a society.
At present, it is my view that there is no cohesive model that actually works. Part of the problem is that certain forces have acted to disconnect 'money' from the value of the products and the means of production.
What makes this a really bad problem is that a couple of those forces are significant elements of the Western economies viz the banking sector, the stock exchanges and the legal fiction that is the 'corporation'. These have created an enormous conflation of illusiory wealth by means of credit, over-production of 'baseless' cash and the harvesting of the 'real' resources of the world to prop up a relatively few economies in a non-sustainable style.
Another related big problem is that, if you are socialist/liberal in your outlook (as I mostly am), it is tempting to try and get government to act as a stabaliser on errant market fluctuations. But economies are hugely complex flows and eddies of activity and predicting and managing them is as fruitless a task as predicting the weather :lol:. That means that too heavy a government hand on the 'regulator' can make matters worse rather than better.
It's why I believe that the only hope of reasonable success in management of economies is to have what we call a Mixed one - where the government takes care of certain essentials that private enterprise just does not do well (civil infrastructure, heath care, power, water etc) and non-corporate private enterprise takes care of the rest.
We had that more or less in Britain and it worked pretty well. If we hadn't impoverished ourselves with two World Wars and getting a conscience too late about Empire and trying to be a little America we'd be doing alright. Sadly, we did do all those things and fell right into the same bear-pit that the USA is in now.
Anyhow, huge precis coming up.
Control of economies by control of the money supply was a popular theory embraced by America in particular but also by other nations, including Britain. Sadly, those theories were based upon shaky foundations that were hidden by the short-term apparent gains for those in financial and political positions of superiority.
In part they were genuinely an attempt to propose an alternative to the earlier models which had seen government try to achieve the same stated goal by control of expenditure in capital projects when times were 'hard'. Those Keynsian models had worked for a time but failed to handle certain circumstances when stagflation came into existence.
So, at present, tho they would never admit it, our 'leaders' have no cogent basis upon which to found their decisions as both major approaches seem to fail. That is, as noted above, because certain key 'institutions' in capitalist economies are poisoned chalices that afflict the very body of which they are a part.
I don't have a solution that has a snowballs chance in hell of ever being implemented because most of them involve the removal of power and wealth from those very institutions that are a part of the problem.
To give an idea of how wrong things have gone, when I first started studying economics in the '70's, it was assumed that by now, with increasing automation and efficiency in production, we would either be working part-time or only if we wanted to!
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