The other Keynesian device is fiscal policy, as with deficit spending by states—that is, governments deliberately spending more than they take in as revenues through their tax systems, again increasing demand and boosting the economy. The new kind of liberal economists that began to favor state intervention (by comparison with the older school that abhorred state intervention in market systems) also favor this method as a more effective measure, the “liberal” aspect being that deficit spending can be used for social investment like improving education and social services. While favoring the latter course, Keynes himself thought that simply “government spending” was crucial rather than the social invest- ment part: burying banknotes in old mines, filling these with refuse, and then having private enterprise dig them up was better than nothing if the goal was to increase employment in ending serious recessions like the depression of the 1930s. (In the end, fiscal deficits proved to be structur- ally necessary just to keep capitalist economies going, with governments regularly having state budgetary deficits on the order of 3–4% of GDP, with this leading to huge and permanent state debts—the U.S. federal government’s total debt is $9.5 trillion, or more than $30,000 per person, while that of the U.K. government is about $1.0 trillion, or more than $15,000 per person.) Keynes proved theoretically what actual economic policy and recurring depressions had long shown in practice: free mar- kets do not spontaneously maximize human well-being. Instead, the state has to intervene through demand management, changing the aggregate level of demand of a capitalist economy through monetary and fiscal policies. Keynes also pointed to the chaotic core of market-based deci-sion making, the utter uncertainty that haunts the capitalist imagination, uncertainty as a self-fulfilling prophecy, uncertainty that when spread widely can even cause depression. As Franklin Roosevelt said in 1933 on becoming president of the United States: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”