Unfortunately, New Deal projects failed in the long run. The number of unemployed still amounted to around 9 million. What finally ended the Great Depression was World War II. Yet, the failure of pump-priming measures did not invalidate Keynes' thesis because government did not have enough funds to stem the tide and because opposition from the private sector feared government intervention in the economy.
Keynes next attacked one of the chief problems of World War II with his simple, original book, How to Pay for the War. He proposed a compulsory savings plan for wage-earners for the purchase of government bonds during wartime, to be reduced at the war's end. In this way, inflation would be defeated by putting into savings the extra war income. Prosperity at the end of the war would be stimulated by the flow of money available for the purchase of consumer goods from the cashing in of bonds. Ironically, this cure was just the opposite of Keynes' cure for depression because a wartime situation is just the reverse of an economic low. Nothing came of the plan, however, for political leaders preferred to use the old method of taxation and rationing, along with the purchase of bonds on a voluntary basis.
While labeled a radical by conservative economists, John Maynard Keynes had nothing but scorn for socialism and communism. Opposed to Marx's view that capitalism was doomed, Keynes believed in a policy of managed capitalism, one which would invigorate and save capitalism. Basically, he was a conservative with one major aim — the creation of a capitalistic economy in which its greatest threat, unemployment, would be forever eliminated. Consequently, he engineered a plan to foster a living and growing capitalism.
