NP - Germany Won't Budge on Austerity: Economic Suicide is Character Building

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

On 16.10.2014 03:46, David Morris wrote:

> Economics ain't that simple.  I mostly ascribe to Keynes re. 
> Depression economic theory.  Krugman makes sense to me.  I am trying 
> to advocate for the best now bandage.

Guido Preparata says:

 > Keynes is a fascinating thing. He has been erected into some kind of 
a colossal wax icon: he is one of those authors who, through posterity's 
massive, torrential, relentless and extraordinarily abiding 
mythologizing effort, have come to lose all adherence to their 
historical, physical existence. And, deep down, Keynes was a mask of 
such fanatical vanity that this kind of modern sanctification must have 
been precisely the type of goal he had been striving to secure for his 
entire life.

Discursively - I mean propaganda-wise - Keynesianism is (or used to be) 
the sort of grand shibboleth that is systematically used and leveraged 
whenever the speaker needs to strike the Liberal pose. In other words, 
when you wish to appear as the sober, reasonable, competent, sharp and 
compassionate moderate, you begin to envelop yourself in Keynesian 
verbigeration: you start with, "as a Keynesian, I should say that ...", 
and then - to impress upon the audience a comforting image of your 
expert and humane "knowledge" - you go on dropping around abstruse 
nonsense such as "the liquidity trap" and/or "the investment multiplier" 
and the incontournable "deficit spending"."

The objective of this standard psychical charade is to convey to those 
around you that: 1) quite evidently you understand perfectly and 
technically what is being discussed (when, in truth, you don't); and 2) 
most critically, that you are a well-bred bourgeois who is possessed by 
no indecorous whim to challenge authority, but that you nonetheless have 
always taken a deepest and purest interest in the fate of the poor 
little folk - hence, "keynesianally", you will always say that a little 
deficit-spending (plus a tad of inflation) would surely relieve the 
wretched "charwoman". In this regard, to play the game in proper 
fashion, you always need, opposite from you, an obnoxious curmudgeon of 
the conservative Right, who's cued to bark about the merits of 
toughness, competition and the naturally self - regulating markets 
presently overburdened by the mad stupidity of the "Socialists". Simply 
said, the Keynesian stance is confected to play "good cop" when the 
economy falls on black days: the Keynesian is the leftist in 
good-standing expected to deplore the avidity of bankers and to invoke 
the sanative power of the state to redress the ravages of corporate 
abuse. It sounds and looks "good", but it neither solves nor explains 
anything.

As for Keynes the man, from what we know, he seems to have cut a pretty 
despicable figure: arrogant, racist, a shameless thief of other people's 
ideas, an exploiter of the underclass (for male prostitutes), and a 
speculator. But more to the point, as a theorist, he was a total 
nullity: he is the /dottore/ of the commedia dell'arte, the pedantic 
character who knows everything without understanding anything thereof.

This man, who had been hailed by Time magazine in 1999 as one of the 
towering gods of the 20th century, failed miserably to comprehend every 
major event of his time: 1) Versailles, case in point; 2) Britain's 
return to gold, which he denounced as the inane archaism that caused the 
Great Strike of 1926 (it was neither the former nor did it cause the 
latter); 3) the coming and severity of the Slump; and 4) the Nazi 
recovery. As for Versailles, he did not have a clue as to what was being 
devised: he stormed out of the conference moaning that Germany could not 
pay what was asked of her, not intuiting, as Veblen did, that those 
astronomical sums were never meant to be paid, but only, through the 
first series of "gold installments", to burst the bubble of the German 
war debt.

But then again, it was not his role to predict, intuit anything; he did 
exactly what the commedia expected of him: a nice little Keynesian 
tantrum, followed by a book that told the story (nowadays it would have 
come with a bonus DVD ... ) ... And then in 1941 (if I remember 
correctly) to crown his remarkable dramatic career he was made a 
director of the Bank of England; yes, imagine him, gloatingly gabbing 
away at the very feet of the High Priest, Montagu Norman ... That's 
Keynes, the great Keynes, the champion of the enlightened middle-class. <

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NF30Dj04.html

One could add that Keynes was also a huge fan of eugenics which he 
called "the most important and significant branch of sociology." To sum 
it up: The guy was an asshole and is - as an economist - hopelessly 
overrated.

Please realize that the crude Keynesianism of folks like Krugman is part 
of our problem today!


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