Keynes Was a Cheapskate

John Maynard Keynes

Let's start the week off with some serious John Maynard Keynes bashing.

In April, 1989, Murray Rothbard did a great job bashing Keynes (the person) at a Mises Institute event held in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

   

 Although Rothbard gave Keynes a thoroughgoing over, he did not mention that Keynes was also a cheapskate despite the fact that on a political/philosophical level, as Rothbard mentioned, Keynes was anti-thrift. Talk about a hypocrite, Keynes was that from start to finish. I am sure Rothbard would have mentioned it if he were aware.

Anyway, the dirt is now out, Justyn Walsh reports:

Keynes, as one of his Bloomsbury contemporaries observed, “loved a bargain." Notwithstanding his growing wealth and generous financial support of the arts, he watched over his personal finances with surprisingly keen eyes. Keynes was not above haggling with tradesman over a few pence, would buy large consignments of war-issue bully beef because it was only a penny a tin, and hosted dinner parties that were legendary for their frugality. Virginia Woolf noted that on occasion Keynes served a miserly three grouse to his eleven guests - the visitors’ “eyes gleaned as the bones went round,” she later remarked with the regulation Bloomsbury barb.

 -RW