Terence Corcoran: Mark Carney’s new military-industrial complex

Terence Corcoran/Financial Post: What Carney is really creating, economically, is another centrally-planned industrial strategy filled with risk in the belief that big state spending and borrowing on the military creates broader growth across the economy.

The theory is known as “military Keynesianism,” based on the ideas of early-20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes, who advocated the use of government spending, including  via deficits, to boost the economy. Whether Keynes would see the MIC system as a generator of jobs and growth is doubtful.

Robert Skidelsky, author of a three-volume biography of Keynes, last year wrote that “Keynes himself would have been depressed” by the existence of military Keynesianism, “but not surprised by the ease with which war fervour can be stoked up to justify Keynesian policies.”…