Eighty years ago an anguished debate between two economists began in Britain — and came to shape the politics of the world after World War Two. The differences between John Maynard Keynes and his nemesis Friedrich Hayek sharply described alternative approaches to addressing the ebb and flow of the business cycle, with Keynes arguing that to put the jobless back to work governments could and should intervene in the market and Hayek insisting that such actions were based on an inadequate understanding of how economics really worked and would only delay the day of reckoning. That snarky disagreement was so vicious and ill-mannered that one old-school economics professor described it as "the method of the duello" being "conducted in the manner of Kilkenny cats." On Tuesday, in the Asia Society on Park Avenue, New York, two teams of economists, one representing Keynes, the other Hayek, will slug it out before an audience of 250 and bring the debate to America. – Reuters

Dominant Social Theme: Get yer popcorn here! Sody Pop, too! The great debate is underway between FA Hayek, a converted socialist and favorite "radical," free-market thinker of the power elite, and John Maynard Keynes, simply the favorite economist of the elites hands-down – forever and ever. This is going to be one good debate! Who will win? Keynes, who said the current economic crisis could be cured using his nostrums? Or Hayek, who for all his compromises with government ideology, predicted it? Doesn't seem like much of a debate to us. But we'll pretend it is ...

Free-Market Analysis: Whatever FA Hayek was or was not, he was a helluva lot better than John Maynard Keynes, a card-carrying monetary crack-dealer for the Anglosphere power elite. An econometric economist, Keynes was always willing to make a specious argument based on statistics and the manipulation of numbers. His talent was in obfuscation; his rhetoric was purposefully dense. Roosevelt said talking to Keynes made his head hurt, but Roosevelt dutifully adopted Keynes's loony promulgations nonetheless.

And what exactly did Keynes preach? What Keynes came up with in his indecipherable and impossibly mathematical treatise, The General Theory, was basically simple enough: Government ought to save up in the good times and then spend money in the bad times. No wonder big government types love him.