Saturday, December 6, 2008

Harvard Alumni Uncover the Real Keynes

Writes Ilana Mercer:
"Keynes At Harvard" provides commendably detailed and scrupulously documented answers:

John Maynard Keynes was a Fabian socialist strongly opposed to private enterprise. The Fabian society was formed in England in the late 1880s and spread throughout the British Empire. The Fabians aimed to replace the market with "an efficient administrative bureaucracy," as F.A. Hayek put it. Its emissaries also came to infect almost every nook and cranny of the American state and civil society.

Fabians departed from communists on the use of force. Whereas the communists believed in "attaining power by violence," Fabians perfected a form of Islamic takiya – lying to spread the faith, in their case, state-socialism.

"Easing into absolute power by deceit" was to be achieved by infiltrating every societal institute under the guise of moderation (and by deploying impeccable manners, once terribly important among the British elites).

Mercer's full column on Keynes is here , and is must reading.

1 comment:

  1. Keynes of course has this to say in the forward to 1936 German edition of his "General Theory".

    "...The theory of aggregated production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state [eines totalen Staates] than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire...."

    There is a full copy online here as well as interesting discussion from historian James J Martin here.

    None of this is to say Keynes was a closet totalitarian, ...but had Milton Friedman written something similar in say the Chilean edition of his 'A Monetary History..', we would have never heard the end of it.

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