Capitalism is often accused of being the source of the injunction: "we must always produce more," or of the formula: "consuming is good for growth." However, these ideas do not stem from traditional capitalism but from Keynesianism, which has dominated the field of economic science and the political class since the 1930s.

Published in 1936, John Maynard Keynes' book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, swept everything in its path. Questioning the causes of the Great Depression and the means to emerge from it, he describes a new economic paradigm, which would convert generations of economists and politicians.

To summarize broadly, public spending produces growth, and to support the budget deficit, a monetary policy of low interest rates must be implemented. Thus, initially, the discretionary increase in public spending would have a multiplier effect on economic activity, capable of limiting the recession and accelerating recovery. Then, in a second phase, money would be considered an instrument of monetary policy to be used by public authorities for macroeconomic stabilization.

Keynesianism is therefore the claim to provide the means for strong growth and full employment through public spending and consumption. This growth plan is based on controlling money.

Indeed, according to Keynes, long-term savings act as a brake on consumption and, therefore, on growth. Money must thus lose its purchasing power over time to encourage individuals to consume more quickly, which is beneficial for the economy. In the Keynesian logic of stimulus policies, the main enemy is savings.

According to Keynes, this enemy can be fought with low-interest liquidity. That is why central banks must regulate and control the money supply.

With Keynes, the 20th century became the century of trust in experts and planning. The social engineers at the helm of government and monetary policy can pull levers intended to restore prosperity, as they possess a macroeconomic vision of the world.

For Keynes, state intervention is necessary to stimulate demand and restart the economic engine. This doctrine has triumphed in universities and textbooks. Yet, state intervention has its flaws and can exacerbate crises in the long term, rather than resolving them.

This is why some economists, in the minority, criticize Keynes for his short-termism and advocate a return to market mechanisms as a more effective alternative to state intervention. Thus, Friedrich Hayek explained that the continual reduction of interest rates by central banks and the artificial expansion of credit could only mislead economic actors, making them invest as if many saved resources existed, since interest rates naturally decrease in response to an increase in savings. This misallocation of resources then fuels an artificial rise in growth, a bubble, which is followed by a brutal recession. It is this contribution to the theory of cycles that earned Hayek the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. Along with others, he also highlighted the danger of centralizing and manipulating currency. This is notably the case with the Frenchman Jacques Rueff, also a disciple and friend of Ludwig von Mises.

Graduating from the École Polytechnique in 1919, Rueff had a distinguished career as a senior civil servant, serving as an economic advisor to numerous governments in the 1920s and 1930s. His major work, L’ordre social (The Social Order), was published in 1945, in which he develops a powerful argument in favor of the free market from economic, philosophical, and moral perspectives.

This book includes a key chapter titled "Sound Money or Totalitarian State." In this chapter, he develops two propositions. The first is: "False money breeds social disorder." The second proposition follows from the first: "Social disorder breeds social slavery". False money is paper currency, disconnected from any physical reality and manipulated by the ruling power. Social disorder is the inflation and consumerism that result from it. Social slavery is society's dependence on the state, the loss of all financial, moral, and political autonomy.

In 1947, five years after the French translation of The General Theory, he published an article titled: The Errors of the General Theory of Lord Keynes. He issued the following warnings: The next period of depression is likely to lead to the widespread adoption of the policy suggested by Lord Keynes around the world. I am not afraid to state that this policy will only reduce unemployment to a small extent, but it will have profound consequences on the evolution of the countries in which it is applied. (...) Because of Lord Keynes, the next cycle will be an opportunity for profound political changes, which some hope for, while others fear. In any case, based on a false theory, the remedies that will be implemented will have profoundly different repercussions from those they were intended to promote. Their inefficacy will be, for a large part of the public opinion, a new reason to demand the substitution of a regime which, by denying itself, will have destroyed itself. Starting from 1958, a policy to rectify the French economy, inspired by Jacques Rueff, was conducted under the authority of General de Gaulle. It will lead to the famous "Trente Glorieuses" (Thirty Glorious Years).

In The Monetary Sin of the West, in 1971, Rueff writes:

He adds: "Inflation is to subsidize expenditures that yield nothing with money that does not exist." According to him: "One would think, observing the evolution of the international monetary system, that the West is applying Lenin's advice, according to which: To destroy the bourgeois regime, it suffices to corrupt its currency.

In 1976, he attacked Keynesianism one last time in an article for the newspaper Le Monde. No religion has spread across the world as quickly as that of employment. Driven by the memory of the unemployment tragedies that ravaged England and Germany during the 1920s, it has become the foremost principle, whether expressed or implied, of economic policy in almost every country in the world. Concealing its purpose beneath the clever and specious guise of the "general theory," elevated by enthusiastic and blind disciples to the status of a governmental action bible, it has masked the true face of the inflation policies it covered. Through this detour, it has given governments a good conscience, which, having exhausted their possibilities for taxes and borrowing, resorted to the deceptive delights of monetary creation. (The End of the Keynesian Era or: When the Long Run Ran Out, Euromoney, April 1976, pp.70-7.)