Keynes and Keynesians have generally not been notably concerned with weeding out undesirable businesses. Keynes himself frankly admitted that the health of the economy required vice, not virtue. Their efforts have been devoted to keeping economies stable by using some combination of policy instruments to avoid overproduction. They advise governments to pump money into the system, or encourage others to pump money into the system, so that there will be enough purchasing power to avoid major gluts of unsold products and thus keep productive processes humming along at some reasonable more or less normal level. In his General Theory Keynes argued against his neo-classical colleagues that the low level equilibrium of the great depression was not a freak It was not something that was going to go away by itself. To make it go away governments and reasonable people in the private sector had to do something about it.

To stabilize the economy Keynes advocated a number of measures that defied the common sense of people brought up to believe that the purpose of business was to make money by producing some useful product or service, and that the measure of business success was the accountant’s balance sheet. Deficit spending by the government in hard times is one of the most famous. He identifies the problem using a kind of reasoning that follows out what happens when account books are kept.

In important ways Keynes identifies the solution to the problem with being able to move beyond an accounting mentality. It is better to put people to work doing something useful than to leave them idle, regardless of what the bookkeepers say about it. Keynes asked people to see the physical and human realities that sometimes became invisible when the world was viewed through the conceptual lenses of accountancy: “The nineteenth century,” he wrote, “carried to extravagant lengths the criterion of what one can call for short “the financial results” as a test of the advisability of any course of action sponsored by private or by collective action. The whole conduct of life was made into a sort of parody of an accountant’s nightmare. Instead of using their vastly increased material wealth and technical resources to build a wonder city, the men of the nineteenth century built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, ‘paid’, whereas the wonder city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of financial fashion, have ‘mortgaged the future’ –though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works to-day can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.” (6)