The background: Can government fix a broken economy? Two great economists disagreed eighty years ago, and their debate dominates politics to this day. As we consider all of the great economic and financial issues facing the West today – tax rates, the role of the state, deficit spending versus austerity measures, sovereign debt, monopolies, the money supply, and so on – we see how our thinking about them was moulded by these two giant protagonists, and are still being fought out within the parameters that they set in the Twenties and Thirties.