ABSTRACT

This chapter explores John Maynard Keynes’s positions on international economics. It discusses his long-held and well-known support for state planning built around an extensive program of public capital accumulation more or less for granted. The chapter argues that the listener and reader were aware that there were ambitious experiments in national economic planning and in national control of international economic activity ongoing in many countries, including in Ireland, where the lecture was delivered. It explains that nineteenth-century free-traders believed their position to be consistent with economic efficiency, individual liberty, and international peace. Keynes stressed the fact that while many countries were experimenting with national economic planning of one sort or another, there was no satisfactory model of democratic and efficient national planning in existence for the British to copy. The whole point of national self-sufficiency was to untie the economy from its existing restraints; to free it up for experimentation with an economically more powerful state.