Pournelle (The decline and fall of Byte)

I don't work for Microsoft, but I have had a similar run-in with Dr. Pournelle. I am a professional economist (a "Dr." too, as it happens), and in some discussion forum or other on GEnie I once quoted Milton Friedman's well-known (among economists) remark that "we're all Keynesians now." If you know the way that macroeconomic theory has converged over the past few decades, the remark makes perfect sense and doesn't detract from Friedman's status as the leader of the believers in the unfettered market. However, Pournelle was on me like a ton of bricks. He clearly _didn't_ understand what Keynesian theory was all about and thought that it just stood for government policies that he didn't like. He didn't care about references, because he "knew" that Friedman just _couldn't_ have said that, sort of like those guys who didn't bother to look into Galileo's telescope because they _knew_ the sun couldn't have spots. Eventually I just gave up on the conversation, and I suppose Pournelle thinks that he won the argument. --Dav david_a._vandenbroucke(a)hud.gov