JimBowie1958
Old Fogey
- Sep 25, 2011
- 63,590
- 16,753
- 2,220
The trouble with most Keynesianists today is that they don't understand nor
implement Keynesian economics but a bastrardization of Fabian socialism
which they lie and call Keynesian and I think these quotes demonstrate this.
John Maynard Keynes - Wikiquote
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist
system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation,
governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of
the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but
they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it
actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches
strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the
existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls,
beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become
'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the
inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the
inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from
month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which
form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as
to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into
a gamble and a lottery."
"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of
society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden
forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner
which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at
suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the
surface with town rubbish, and leave it private enterprise on well tried
principals of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again ..., there need be no more
unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the
community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal
greater than it actually is."
"I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal
efficiency of capital goods on long views and on the basis of the general
social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly
organising investment;.."
"The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its
failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable
distribution of wealth and incomes."
"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do
the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
"The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of
which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not
intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it
doesn't deliver the goods. In short we dislike it, and we are beginning to
despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely
perplexed."
"The book [Hayek's "Prices and Production"], as it stands, seems to me to be
one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound
proposition in it beginning with page 45 [Hayek provided historical
background up to page 45; after that came his theoretical model], and yet it
remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the
mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a
mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam."
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
Regarding the peace process at the end of the First World War:
"The division of the spoils between the victors will also provide employment
for a powerful office, whose doorsteps the greedy adventurers and jealous
concession hunters of twenty or thirty nations will crowd and defile."
"If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a
million, it has."
"They offer me neither food nor drink - intellectual nor spiritual
consolation... [Conservatism] leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it
conforms to no intellectual standard, it is not safe, or calculated to
preserve from the spoilers that degree of civilisation which we have already
attained."
"When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance,
there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid
ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us
for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful
of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be
able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The
love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a
means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be recognised for what
it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal,
semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the
specialists in mental disease ... But beware! The time for all this is not
yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to
everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is
not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer
still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity
into daylight."
"This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning. For the
resources of nature and men's devices are just as fertile and productive as
they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of
life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for
everyone a high standard of life ... and will soon learn to afford a
standard higher still. We were not previously deceived. But to-day we have
involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of
a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is
that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time - perhaps for a
long time."
"The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end,-but generally to be
obtained at your neighbor's expense."
On Communism:
"Leninism is a combination of two things which Europeans have kept for some
centuries in different compartments of the soul - religion and business. We
are shocked because the religion is new, and contemptuous because the
business, being subordinated to the religion instead of the other way round,
is highly inefficient."
"Comfort and habits let us be ready to forego, but I am not ready for a
creed which does not care how much it destroys the liberty and security of
daily life, which uses deliberately the weapons of persecution, destruction
and international strife. How can I admire a policy which finds a
characteristic expression in spending millions to suborn spies in every
family and group at home, and to stir up trouble abroad?"
"How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the
boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with
whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all
human advancement?"
"I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good sense; but
the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie."
"Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion
- how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and
enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events
of history."
"For my part I think that capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made
more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet
in sight, but that in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable."
"I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens."
"Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the ignorant by
the incompetent".
"In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic." - 1924
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
"We will not have any more crashes in our time." - Conversation with Felix
Somary in 1927
"I should have drunk more champagne." - last words, as quoted in Ben
Trovato's Art of Survival (2007)
And last but not least, Keynes was a member of the British Eugenics Society,
Galton Institute - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
implement Keynesian economics but a bastrardization of Fabian socialism
which they lie and call Keynesian and I think these quotes demonstrate this.
John Maynard Keynes - Wikiquote
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist
system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation,
governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of
the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but
they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it
actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches
strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the
existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls,
beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become
'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the
inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the
inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from
month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which
form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as
to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into
a gamble and a lottery."
"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of
society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden
forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner
which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at
suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the
surface with town rubbish, and leave it private enterprise on well tried
principals of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again ..., there need be no more
unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the
community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal
greater than it actually is."
"I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal
efficiency of capital goods on long views and on the basis of the general
social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly
organising investment;.."
"The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its
failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable
distribution of wealth and incomes."
"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do
the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
"The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of
which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not
intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it
doesn't deliver the goods. In short we dislike it, and we are beginning to
despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely
perplexed."
"The book [Hayek's "Prices and Production"], as it stands, seems to me to be
one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound
proposition in it beginning with page 45 [Hayek provided historical
background up to page 45; after that came his theoretical model], and yet it
remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the
mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a
mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam."
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
Regarding the peace process at the end of the First World War:
"The division of the spoils between the victors will also provide employment
for a powerful office, whose doorsteps the greedy adventurers and jealous
concession hunters of twenty or thirty nations will crowd and defile."
"If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a
million, it has."
"They offer me neither food nor drink - intellectual nor spiritual
consolation... [Conservatism] leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it
conforms to no intellectual standard, it is not safe, or calculated to
preserve from the spoilers that degree of civilisation which we have already
attained."
"When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance,
there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid
ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us
for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful
of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be
able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The
love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a
means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be recognised for what
it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal,
semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the
specialists in mental disease ... But beware! The time for all this is not
yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to
everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is
not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer
still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity
into daylight."
"This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning. For the
resources of nature and men's devices are just as fertile and productive as
they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of
life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for
everyone a high standard of life ... and will soon learn to afford a
standard higher still. We were not previously deceived. But to-day we have
involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of
a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is
that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time - perhaps for a
long time."
"The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end,-but generally to be
obtained at your neighbor's expense."
On Communism:
"Leninism is a combination of two things which Europeans have kept for some
centuries in different compartments of the soul - religion and business. We
are shocked because the religion is new, and contemptuous because the
business, being subordinated to the religion instead of the other way round,
is highly inefficient."
"Comfort and habits let us be ready to forego, but I am not ready for a
creed which does not care how much it destroys the liberty and security of
daily life, which uses deliberately the weapons of persecution, destruction
and international strife. How can I admire a policy which finds a
characteristic expression in spending millions to suborn spies in every
family and group at home, and to stir up trouble abroad?"
"How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the
boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with
whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all
human advancement?"
"I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good sense; but
the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie."
"Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion
- how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and
enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events
of history."
"For my part I think that capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made
more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet
in sight, but that in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable."
"I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens."
"Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the ignorant by
the incompetent".
"In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic." - 1924
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
"We will not have any more crashes in our time." - Conversation with Felix
Somary in 1927
"I should have drunk more champagne." - last words, as quoted in Ben
Trovato's Art of Survival (2007)
And last but not least, Keynes was a member of the British Eugenics Society,
Galton Institute - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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