I think Keynes ideas would work if they were properly implemented. The jury is still out this time around, but I really don't think that there will be enough leveraging down by the government, once a robust economy returns, as Keynes recommended, to compensate for leveraging up during the recession. If the Keynes prescription is not properly applied, you can't blame Keynes.
There's a lot of truth to that. The problem, like you mentioned, is Governments can't be trusted to responsibly police the system. Nor can Central Bankers, who are overwhelming beholden to private banks that own the Federal Reserve System and hold appointment and voting sway on the FOMC. The bottom-line is Keynesian economics works great in theory, but not in practice. It's completely corruptible and been completely corrupted. We need to legalize competing currencies and go from there. The ruling political, banking and industrial elite won't let that happen so it's pretty much unavoidable we'll get a dollar and economic collapse, followed by some type of marital law, and then only God knows what from there.
No. Not at all. There are two parts to what Keynes recommended. We are still very much in the first part. You'll have to wait and see if the government properly implements the second part, which could be a number of years from now, before you can judge whether Keynes prescription for recessions worked in the present case. (I don't have much hope of the government applying the second part properly, in which case you certainly could not conclude that Keynes prescription for recessions did not work.)
We didn't get rid of regulations in the net (the number grew/grows every year) and the tax cuts weren't met by spending cuts. David Stockman noticed the problems while he worked for Reagan. The whole "Reagan tried the laissez faire approach and it didn't work" line is another myth. He only tried the easy parts of it--just like all modern politicians.
Keynesianism should've been thrown out in the 70s, when stagflation occurred. That was supposed to be impossible...so major textbook rewrites were in order. Basically, Keynes sold politicians ideas that they loved and the rest is unfortunately history.
"Lawful money" is defined by legal precedent as only federal reserve notes. Competing currencies is an idea put forth by Ron Paul, which legalizes alternative currencies to fiat, federal reserve notes. It could be silver and gold-backed notes. It could be commodity-back money (oil/cattle/grains etc). It could be time-value notes, where laborers trade their own time in lieu of payment. It could be something nobody has thought of, but the market later accepts and runs with it. The Feds shut-down E-gold and Liberty Dollars because they intend to suppress the movement towards alternative currencies. If left to take root, commodity-backed money would spread like wild fire. The basis of Government and Banking power is seniorage, which implies 1) a fiat currency and 2) the general economy using that fiat currency in all transactions. If we move to an alternative currency, something that can't be counterfeited, both the Government and Bankers would lose their counterfeiting monopoly ("monetization" and "loan creation"), which would erase the massive power they hold over the nation. It's all academic, but it's an age-old battle that's raged on for thousands of years.