Voltaire on Government
Voltaire defined government as “a device for taking money out of one set of pockets and putting it into another.”*
It appears Keynesian stimulus was debunked two and a half centuries before Keynes even came up with the idea. Economic growth comes from the creation of new wealth. The best government can do is shuffle around wealth created by others.
(*cf. Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State, p. 128)