"Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more."
— Thomas Sowell, written for Milton Friedman's centenary, 2012
Sowell wrote this in 2012, marking what would have been Friedman's hundredth birthday. The observation is methodological before it is political.
A theory that accounts equally well for success and for failure has quietly stopped being a theory. If insufficient spending is always available as the explanation for a disappointing result, then no result can ever count against the prescription — and an argument that cannot lose is not winning.
