Hume predicted the end of Great Britain due to excessive debt issuance just at the moment that Great Britain was about to dominate the world for a century. It's hard to be that wrong; and yet the arguments against debt, in essentially the same form, continue to be used today, three hundred years later. Facts, it seems, seldom triumph over a good liberal ideology, and when it comes to a good liberal ideology, you can't beat Adam Smith.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 290