Bring back the Keynesians

THE IDEOLOGICAL heirs of Ayn Rand were shrieking in the letters section of Tuesday's Globe ("In praise of chief executives") because a liberal correspondent dared to challenge their childlike belief in the power and purity of the market ("Too little outrage over pay inequity," Aug. 28). "The market," of course, is the neoconservative euphemism for shameless, unchecked corporate avarice, which is threatened by the very idea of effective government.

In typical neocon fashion, these angry children of Howard Roark resort to name-calling ("self-loathing, America-hating") and the simplistic black-white dichotomy that characterizes conservative thought these days. If it isn't free-market capitalism, it's "pro-Marxist," or "socialist," or a conflation of liberal Keynesian economics with Marxism.

The Keynesian model, with an active role for government in regulating industry against the excesses of unrestrained capitalism, arose after the Depression, which had been caused by the same kind of unregulated, free-market economics that post-Reagan Republicans advocate today. But it was a conservative Republican, Herbert Hoover, who most succinctly summarized the error of their ways when he said: "The trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They're too damn greedy."

What we need today is a well-regulated capitalist economy, to restore the economic balance and prosperity America enjoyed at the height of liberal Democratic governance in the 1960s.

RICH LATIMER
Falmouth