ABSTRACT
Economic considerations are restraints rather than overriding determinants. Economic wants and economic satisfactions are important but not absolutes. Above all, economic activities, economic institutions, economic rationality are means to noneconomic, that is, human or social ends, rather than ends in themselves. It may not be sheer accident that the two countries that never adopted Keynesian economics, Japan and West Germany, have been the two countries that have done spectacularly well in the forty years since World War II whereas the two countries of the Keynesian persuasion, Great Britain and the United States, have steadily been losing ground and are in danger of becoming noncompetitive. The Keynesian prescription, to create prosperity and productivity through government spending, has clearly reached its end in both the United States and the United Kingdom. In these countries government spending to stimulate consumption can only aggravate stagnation and inflation.
