John Maynard Keynes offered the term “animal spirits” to colorfully describe the human psychology driving economics. In his view, enterprising people would always act in an enterprising fashion with the right incentives. The collective despondence of societies accounted for what turned out to be the Great Depression. Only government leaders could provide the sort of collective intelligence to guide these natural “animal spirits”. Collectivists and statists are as uniquely stubborn in ignoring reality as say traditional conservatives are in holding on to old discredited ideas. (It is, for example, established that the contraction of the money supply by state banking authorities … Continue reading Human Spirits