I write,

If you follow the news media, you may think that the economics profession is divided into two camps: the majority, who favor the stimulus bill; and a minority, who are against any stimulus. In fact, there are many of us who support the idea of a stimulus but who question the Pelosi bill.

Along similar lines, Mario Rizzo writes,

if we are going to attempt to solve the problems of today by drawing inspiration from Keynes, then we should pay attention to his mature ideas rather than to the textbook versions of what he said, some of which reflect Keynes’s earlier thinking. When we do this we shall find that some of his policy proposals were quite different from today’s “Keynesian” wisdom. Other proposals were extraordinarily radical and far from what is being proposed by lawmakers on the political left or right today.

Both essays offer some lessons in the history of economic thought.