Recent events have led to renewed calls for a policy of stimulus through government spending,in line with the prescriptions of Keynesian economics. J. S. Mill’s ignored and commonly misunderstood Fourth Proposition on capital shows, when correctly understood as Mill intended, that this is a futile and dangerous policy to follow.

For most of his career Dr Kates worked for industry having been for a quarter of a century the Chief Economist for the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (the Australian equivalent of the CBI). As part of this work, he was responsible for the preparation of economic submissions on behalf of business in every area of economic policy. His Say’s Law and the Keynesian Revolution, originally published in 1998 but released again in paper in 2009 following the GFC, discussed the loss to economic theory of the disappearance of the classical theory of the cycle. His ‘Free Market Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader’, looks at the world as if entrepreneurs and uncertainty matter, and which shows that Keynesian economics is a completely misguided guide to policy, has just been published by Edward Elgar.

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