Pub Date:
Tue, 01/24/2012
Source:
Note:
Keynes first found fame when he resigned in 1918 from the Allied team planning to impose crippling reparations upon the defeated Germans in the Treaty of Versailles. His ‘‘Economic Consequences of the Peace’’ was a masterpiece of invective that warned that deliberately impoverishing an advanced industrial country would encourage extreme political movements that might provoke a second world war.
He was right. Weimar Germany was buffeted by civil unrest and revolutions; its tenuous democracy was discarded in favor of Nazism. It is just such a risk that Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy run today when they preside over the deliberate beggaring of their weaker European neighbors.
