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Senator King (1933):
“I suggest to the Senator from Minnesota, in the form of a question, if he is not becoming heterodox?”
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Senator Shipstead:
“I have seen the dire results of orthodox policies pursued here. We have pursued policies here for the past fifteen years which have been guaranteed to be orthodox, and we see the results, the dire results. Within the past two years we have been called upon to vote for orthodox policies to stop the depression. I have voted against every one of them, because I did not consider that they would have any effect on the depression at all except to increase its intensity and postpone the final day of reckoning. So, I have no apology to make. One is almost forced to the conclusion that to be economically sound, a man has to be an idiot.”
So the orthodox-heterodox split is at least 76 years old, even though the orthodoxy and the heterodoxy have both changed. What is constant is the recognition of the essentially theological nature of the field.
P.S. Shipstead was a New Dealer from the radical Minnesota Farmer Labor Party. The proposals he’d been opposing were Hoover’s.
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November 10, 2009 at 9:57 pm
John, might be nice to have some context. What are the general policies the two Senators are fighting for? Is it fair to assume that Shipstead is advocating and (the) Kind opposing New Deal reforms?
November 10, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Yes, the pressure for social spending, economic reforms, and Keynesian spending came especially from various Western independents, progressives, populists, etc. Shipstead had opposed Hoover’s programs.
Shipstead was from the Farmer-Labor Party, but he was really an independent since he was their first and only successful candidate for about eight years and generally ignored the party.
November 14, 2009 at 11:07 pm
But what’s heterodox at one level is orthodox at another. E.g., Keynes considered himself heterodox and probably was regarded as such by other capitalists but orthodox from the perspective of, say, an anarchist.
November 16, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Most college boys were told the New Deal was “Keynesian”, but that’s not so obvious from the historical record. Keynes may have favored some govt. intervention at times (mainly in regards to speculation), and mentioned labor a few times, but he had no problem approving of Hayek’s laissez-faire-libertarian platform; his reforms were usually advice to businessmen, such as telling them to make wiser investments (and to tell the workingmen to save their shekels). It’s unlikely that Keynes approved of all of the regulatory measures of the New Deal.
November 16, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Keynes proposed deficit spending during downturns, but FDR only weakly and briefly did that. In 1932 his program was interventionist but sort of a hodgepodge, in 1934 he moved left, and then after the 1936 election he turned right again and reduced spending, with disastrous results. That’s when he lost the progressives.
November 16, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Anything produced by anglo-zionists, even Oxbridge sorts, should be considered suspect, starting at least with Adam Smith, the salesman’s filosophe (or maybe Hobbes, but Hobbes was sort of an honest thief). That was Hegel’s ‘tude towards Britannia as well, mostly. He was disappointed by Bonaparte’s loss at Waterloo.
March 23, 2011 at 12:22 pm
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