Stephen Lerner

Lyndon LaRouche Debates Abba Lerner (Full Debate)

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• published: 09 Oct 2014
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On Dec. 2nd, 1971 an encounter took place at Queens College, in New York City, which shook the international financial community. Economist and political leader Lyndon LaRouche faced off in debate against the leading Keynesian economist Abba Lerner. Following President Nixon's "pulling the plug" on the Bretton Woods system on Aug. 15, 1971, Lyndon LaRouche (then known by his pen name, Lyn Marcus), and his associates in the National Caucus of Labor Committees, warned of the danger of fascism arising from economic collapse. The "issues" of the debate had been put forward in a leaflet by LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees, specifically on the questions of the wage-price controls and fascist austerity policy being put into place at that time by the Nixon Administration, and by the government of Brazil. LaRouche and his associates had branded these policies as in the tradition of Hjalmar Schacht, Adolf Hitler's Economics Minister up to 1936, and condemned them as such. That, combined with a public ridicule of the economics profession as a bunch of "Quackademics" for their head in the sand belief in Paul Samuelsons delusional assertion that economic crisis's were not possible because the system had built in stabilizers and that no human intelligence was required to maintain the system proved to be too much and Lerner was tasked with taking on the "upstart" LaRouche on behalf of the economic profession. Mr. LaRouche recounts the debate and the sadly unrecorded confrontation after the formal event had concluded, "I then, in September 1971, uttered a challenge to the leading economists who, then and now, had failed to foresee this development. Weeks later, a leading Keynesian economist, Professor Abba Lerner, a close associate of NYU Professor Sidney Hook, accepted this challenge. The great debate occurred at Queens College. Lerner responded to my charge that the policies he was defending were leading toward fascism in the same general way Adolf Hitler was brought to power in Germany. Lerner weakly burped his fatal reply, that if the German Social-Democrats had accepted the policies of Hjalmar Schacht, "Hitler would not have been necessary"! The assembled audience knew, with that admission by Lerner, the debate had closed." Professor Sidney Hook threatened, that my defeat of Lerner in that debate meant that he and his associates would see to it that I would not be allowed on the stage of public policy-shaping again. Perhaps, you might suggest to my critics, still today, that I was just a lot smarter than the economists and political figures who have disagreed with me on these economic and political issues then, and those which still do so today." As an official Establishment pronouncement to LaRouche, Sidney Hook, the grand-master of the American branch of the Cold War era Congress for Cultural Freedom proclaimed LaRouche guilty of exposing one of their economists as a follower of of Nazi finance minister Hjalmar Schacht. Later in September 24, 1976, Stephen Rosenfeld writes an op-ed in the Washington Post titled "NCLC: A Domestic Political Menace," in which he sets out a media policy for dealing with LaRouche: "We of the press should be chary of offering them print or air time. There is no reason to be too delicate about it: Every day we decide whose voices to relay. A duplicitous violence prone group with fascistic proclivities should not be presented to the public unless there is reason to present it in those terms. . . . The government should be encouraged to take all legal steps to keep the NCLC from violating the political rights of other Americans."