Also, I agree with contrarian23 on Keynes - if you live in Europe you see that austerity doesn't cut it - when Obama got elected, unemployment in the US was 12% and it was around 8% in the Euro zone. Now it is under 8% in the US and over 12% in the Eurozone.
Keynes tells you why.
But there is more: today the real problem is that governments can't really govern - that "electronic herd" of Thomas Friedman, the "markets" (also known as speculators or finance capital for all you sophisticated folks) punish any government that goes outside a very strict and counter-productive (except for bond holders and other financial sector interests) policies range.
Keynes, at Bretton Woods, understood that the old gold standard had strangled economies (since production went up with modern technology, but the amount of money was fixed at the quantity of gold) and implicitly that a system like today's with freely floating currencies, despite paradoxically being the opposite extreme of the gold standard, would have a similar effect of allowing unproductive parts of the economy to determine what happened to the real economy and what governments could or could not do.
So the system of semi-fixed exchange rates, with changes to be determined politically through diplomacy and negotiation by elected officials and their appointees, would give maximum freedom to democratic governments to explore alternatives based on the input from their citizens, the needs, national interests and other criteria more appropriate to free republics.
Which by the way Italy and Greece are not anymore, since we now have an unelected government in Italy run by a banker (which has just announced that we can't afford a public health care system that is 2nd or 3rd best in the world) and a Greece has total chaos since when Papandreou called allowing the Greek people to vote on the austerity policies and whether their national destiny was best served by staying in the Euro he was openly overthrown by the EU commission and IMF, and replaced with an ex-World Bank director. Greece by the way now has the pre-Obama health care system the US had - if you lose your job, which is very likely now, you lose your health insurance and some people have already died as a result, shocking the country.
I will take Keynes any day.