Lord Keynes, Professor Hansen, and Professor Lerner Want to Abolish Interest and Return Us to the Dark Ages

The modern champions of the “easy money” policy take pride in calling themselves unorthodox and slander their adversaries as orthodox, old-fashioned and reactionary. One of the most eloquent spokesmen of what is called functional finance, Professor Abba Lerner, pretends that in judging fiscal measures he and his friends resort to what “is known as the method of science as opposed to scholasticism.” The truth is that Lord Keynes, Professor Alvin H. Hansen and Professor Lerner, in their passionate denunciation of interest, are guided by the essence of Medieval Scholasticism’s economic doctrine, the disapprobation of interest. While emphatically asserting that a return to the nineteenth century’s economic policies is out of the question, they are zealously advocating a revival of the methods of the Dark Ages and of the orthodoxy of old canons.

--Ludwig von Mises, The Causes of the Economic Crisis: And Other Essays Before and After the Great Depression, ed. Percy L. Greaves Jr., trans. Bettina Bien Greaves and Percy L. Greaves Jr. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006), 193.