MEANWHILE, TRILLIONS IN STIMULUS PRODUCED DEFLATION...:

U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne wrote in these pages Dec. 14 that Keynesians wanting more spending and more borrowing "were wrong in the recovery, and they are wrong now." The land of John Maynard Keynes and Adam Smith is going with Smith.

Why? In part, because even in economics, you can't be wrong too many times in a row.

Keynesians told us that once interest rates got stuck at or near zero, economies would fall into a deflationary spiral. Deflation would lower demand, causing more deflation, and so on.

It never happened. Zero interest rates and low inflation turn out to be quite a stable state, even in Japan. Yes, Japan is growing more slowly than one might wish, but with 3.5% unemployment and no deflationary spiral, it's hard to blame slow growth on lack of "demand."

Our first big stimulus fell flat, leaving Keynesians to argue that the recession would have been worse otherwise. George Washington's doctors probably argued that if they hadn't bled him, he would have died faster.

With the 2013 sequester, Keynesians warned that reduced spending and the end of 99-week unemployment benefits would drive the economy back to recession. Instead, unemployment came down faster than expected, and growth returned, albeit modestly. The story is similar in the U.K.

These are only the latest failures. Keynesians forecast depression with the end of World War II spending. The U.S. got a boom. The Phillips curve failed to understand inflation in the 1970s and its quick end in the 1980s, and disappeared in our recession as unemployment soared with steady inflation.

Still, facts and experience are seldom decisive in economics.

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