>>There has been a thought cycle followed that can be crudely
>>summarized as follows. J.B. Say: supply creates its own demand. More
>>particularly for capitalism, saving creates investment which creates growth.
>>The central accomplishment of Keynes was to show that there was no automatic
>>link between savings and investment that would serve to keep things
>>functioning smoothly, ever expanding output and profits.
>
>I think you will find that Marx spotted the flaw in Say's thinking
>before Keynes did.
>Lew
Right, Lew, but not really relevant to what I was saying. I was responding to Michael Yates' question by sketching how we got from Say's Law to Keynes' challenge of it (essentially duplicated at the same time by Kalecki, BTW) *within the dominant, neoclassical paradigm*, and finally to its recent reassertion in simpleminded form by Laffer and the boys. The belief in automatic adjustments that allow capital to right itself, which springs from Say's Law, was the ideology that took the world into depression in the 30s. The depression provided a setting for Keynes' attack.
Following WWII, the guys who run the economics departments at your local university had no trouble sqeezing most of the importance out of what Keynes had said (over the muffled protests of Robinson, Schackle, etc.), and stuffing the rest into their static neoclassical models. Since those models explain nothing, it was a simple matter for someone to reassert J.B. Say, substituting one vacuity (this one leading to policies more useful to capital) for another (bastardized Keynes).
Keynes' musing about social control of investment is, of course, a long way from control of the means of production. And the essence of the Marx's laws of motion is instability (disproportionality, realization problems). But you know that.