Keynes

[ish mailian]

This is funny. I can't read it as a serious condemnation of the dead
economist, as in the end, as Keynes or George Harrison, or maybe some
sacred text from the East proclaimed, "all things must past" or something
like that.
  Lots of truth in it, about the use and abuse of Keynes. Including by the
author who doesn't mention the two dozen volumes Keyes wrote nor the
admiration, not for his arrogance, of course,  but for his intellect,
Keynes earned and deserved, from smart folks like Bertram Russell. He
changed the world. He did. He can't be denied that. But in the end, as they
say, we're all just us and them and or din ary men

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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