Keynes

[Mark Thibodeau]

Good ol' Guido.

He thinks we're all wrong about Hitler, too!

Nice intellectual company you keep.

J

On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 3:34 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> ... 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 ...
>
>
> Guido Preparata
>
>
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