Rhetoric enters into economics frequently at the junctures of alternative government policies and debates grounding competing theories of unexpected events and prudent solutions.When economies turn in widely unanticipated directions, critical discussions arise to spark questions about the legitimacy, power, and correctness of policy response.In October 1932, there appeared in The Times of London a series of brief letter exchanges signed by John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich August von Hayek (along with some of their associates) in which alternative explanations were defended about the causes of economic activity.Those explanations were grounded in macro-and microeconomics, which in the terms of the 1930s were contested as trade cycle or monetary theories (Rizzo, 2009).Also at issue, however, was a choice between alternative strategies of political economy.Nineteen thirty-two appeared to be a time of nascent recovery from the effects of falling equity values, but also could be seen as the beginning of a new era of trade protectionism and monetary contraction.One policy choice was for governments to distribute tax or printed money to citizens in the form of unemployment insurance or guaranteed employment programs to supplement private spending.Another was for governments to exercise restraint in borrowing and spending and let private capital adjust economies to new productive levels by securing good investments over time.While the subsequent decisions of the British government conformed to neither choice unequivocally, the events of the Great Depression that followed have at various times been appropriated by Hayek and Keynes' successors as evidence that the theoretical arguments of one or other have been vindicated by collective experience.The present day is another time in which theoretical controversy and alternative practices are conjoined.Named by some as "the Great Recession," the period that began in 2008 has seen accelerating rates of defaults on loan repayments, job layoffs, financial institutional distress, and speculative shortselling of sovereign debt.But this moment has also