Today’s column wasn’t written as a response to Noah Smith’s examination of conservative economic arguments since the crisis, but it has an obvious bearing.

Smith bends over backwards to try to find some truth in the various arguments bubbling up from the right — they’ve been 50 percent right on the budget? Really? — but still finds an extraordinary record of getting everything wrong. Why?

Well, Kalecki had the answer. We are in a Keynesian crisis that calls for Keynesian policies; but conservatives find both the diagnosis and the cure anathema, for political reasons. Conceding that the government can and should create jobs would devalue the importance of being nice to businessmen, and suggest that in general the government can do good things. So the obvious diagnosis and response are unacceptable.

And hence the seemingly endless series of bad new ideas. These ideas don’t add up to a coherent counter-theory of the crisis; they’re more a matter of throwing stuff at Keynes, hoping that something will stick.

Are liberals just the same? Actually, no — not now, anyway. Conservatives were quick to claim that liberals were just looking for an excuse to spend more — remember Robert Lucas accusing Christy Romer of “shlock economics”, of making up an analysis to justify Obama’s lust for spending? But liberals aren’t the mirror image of conservatives; they don’t seek big government as an end in itself. And in this crisis, liberals have just been sticking with the textbook, while conservatives are desperately seeking ways to ignore what we know.

Hence the remarkable record of wrongness.