Chapter 14, Keynes lets himself go.
In his final chapter, concluding notes on the social philosophy towards which the general
theory might lead, Keynes really lets himself go.
Here he assumes that all his previous propositions have been proved and draws his triumphant
and Sweeping Conclusions.
This chapter, therefore, is even more tightly packed with fallacies and unwarranted deductions
than any of the others.
But it has the advantage of stating its fallacies in relatively clear and un-technical language,
and it will therefore give us the opportunity also of reviewing them in clearer and less
The Outstanding Faults of the Economic Society in Which We Live, Keynes Begins, are its Failure to Provide for Full Employment and its Arbitrary and Inequitable Distribution of Wealth and Incomes, page 372.
There are four chief things wrong with this statement.
One, the vagueness of Keynes's full employment concept, to which we shall return later for closer examination.
Two, prolonged mass unemployment is not the fault of our economic society,
but of governmental interventions in labor-management relations, wage rates and money and banking
policy, the very kind of intervention that Keynes wished to increase.
3.
The distribution of wealth and incomes is, in the main, neither arbitrary nor inequitable
in a competitive free-market system.
As John Bates Clark showed so brilliantly in The Distribution of Wealth, 1899, free competition
tends to give to labor what labor creates, to capitalists what capital creates, and to
entrepreneurs what the coordinating function creates.
Individual inequities are bound to occur, but they are not systematic.
The system itself tends constantly to reduce them by its rewards to production.
If we are looking for really arbitrary and inequitable distribution, we can find it in
the East, or in backward and underdeveloped countries, or in communist Russia and China,
in short, in either pre-capitalistic or socialist societies.
4. It is even a misnomer in capitalist countries to call this process distribution. Income and wealth are not distributed but produced, and in general go to those who produce them.
But even if all this were not true, there is no reason to suppose that the Keynesian nostrums would remedy the situation.
Keynes next goes on to praise the significant progress brought about by the progressive income tax and death duties,
a progress that economists are coming increasingly to doubt.
Up to the point where full employment prevails, he tells us,
the growth of capital depends not at all on a low propensity to consume,
but is, on the contrary, held back by it, pages 372 to 373.
An increase in the habitual propensity to consume will, in general, i.e. except in conditions
of full employment, serve to increase at the same time the inducement to invest, page 373.
The growth of wealth, so far from being dependent on the abstinence of the rich, as is commonly
supposed, is more likely to be impeded by it.
One of the chief social justifications of great inequality of wealth is, therefore,
removed.
Page 373
How marvelous is the Keynesian world!
The more you spend, the more you save.
The more you eat your cake, the more cake you have.
The less you save, the more inducement you have to invest.
But there is, perhaps, a flaw in this logic.
Even Keynes has insisted that saving and investment must be equal.
As you can only invest what you save, the less you save, the less you are able to invest,
no matter how great the inducement to invest.
Moreover, it is not excessive saving that creates unemployment, but excessive wage rates.
Wage rates that is above the marginal productivity point.
But we have been over and over all this ground before.
There follows a long paragraph in which Keynes concedes that,
There is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth, but not for such large disparities as exist today.
Page 374
It appears that there are valuable human activities which require the motive of money-making,
But much lower stakes will serve the purpose equally well, and the task of transmuting
human nature must not be confused with the task of managing it.
This paragraph is revelatory.
It betrays the totalitarian touch.
It shows Keynes in the role of Father Knows Best.
He and his friends know, just by personal judgment, exactly what rewards and penalties
are necessary.
The people are to be managed by the Keynesian elite.
A man does not have a right to keep what he earns, but allowing him to keep some of it
is a gracious privilege in which a government clique of omniscient Keynesians may indulge
him, like allowing a child to have just a little candy.
Just what, except expediency, prevented Keynes from announcing himself a complete socialist
I do not know.
What he seemed to want was a government-managed economy that would imitate some of the features
of capitalism.
The Euthanasia of the Ranthier
Keynes turns back next to his theory of the rate of interest.
The justification for a moderately high rate of interest has been found hitherto in the
necessity of providing a sufficient inducement to save.
But we have shown that the extent of effective saving is necessarily determined by the scale
of investment, and that the scale of investment is promoted by a low rate of interest.
Thus, it is to our best advantage to reduce the rate of interest to that point relatively
to the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital at which there is full employment.
There can be no doubt that this criterion will lead to a much lower rate of interest
than has ruled hitherto.
Page 375 Now, many non-Keynesian economists are not
sure that the inducement to save increases in direct proportion to the rate of interest.
We need not go into the pros and cons of this argument, except to point out that a certain
minimum interest rate is necessary to induce, if not saving, at least investment, which
Which Keynes tells us is his main interest.
Keynes persistently thinks of investment as merely what a borrowing entrepreneur puts
into his own business.
I am here using the term to mean also any loan that a man makes with his savings, the
purchase of a bond, etc.
When Keynes tells us that the scale of effective saving is necessarily determined by the scale
of Investment, he forgets that the primary causation is the other way round.
Saving determines investment.
Without saving, there is nothing to invest.
Even on Keynes's own definitions, investment cannot come into being without equivalent
savings.
To say that the scale of investment is promoted by a low rate of interest is to look at the
the matter solely from the point of view of the borrower and to forget the point of view
of the lender.
Suppose we applied Keynes's dictums to buying and selling.
We would then write something like this.
Buying is not determined by purchasing power, but effective purchasing power is determined
by the scale of buying, and the scale of buying is promoted by low prices.
This would be immediately recognized as nonsense.
Even a Keynesian might be expected to see that the scale of selling or of producing
for sale is promoted by high prices, which give the highest inducement to produce.
Of course, in practice, the maximum production, buying and selling are achieved by the right
equilibrium price, the price which does most to harmonize the desires and incentives of
producers, sellers, buyers and consumers, respectively.
So it is with interest rates.
The interest rate that promotes the maximum saving, lending, borrowing and investment is
is neither the highest interest rate nor the lowest interest rate, but an equilibrium interest
rate at which the greatest numbers of desires and incentives of both lenders and borrowers
are reconciled.
Keynes's theory of the interest rate, like his emphasis on the monetary income of consumers
and on the propensity to consume, is purely a demand theory.
Just as he seems to think in terms solely of the propensity to spend and buy, and not
of the propensity to work or produce or sell, so he thinks solely of the incentive to borrow
and ignores the need of the incentive to save and to lend.
When he takes account of the latter incentive, he does so only to denounce it as anti-social
and wicked.
How does Keynes know that there can be no doubt that a rate of interest fixed in accordance
with the marginal efficiency of capital at which there is full employment will be a much
lower rate of interest than has ruled hitherto?
Apparently because his personal feelings tell him so.
I feel sure that the demand for capital is strictly limited in the sense that it would
Page 375 Insofar as there is any argument at all for
For the conclusion on page 375, it seems to rest on the question-begging assumption that
unemployment is the result of excessive interest rates rather than excessive wage rates.
Keynes does not appear to understand even the main purpose of capital and capital goods.
That purpose is not merely to increase output and to produce consumer goods that could not
otherwise be produced, but to reduce costs of production.
Why would anybody invest in capital goods if he got no net return worth speaking of?
Let us take, for example, a house that costs $20,000 to build.
One can understand that a man might build such a house to live in himself.
One can understand that he might build it to rent out to someone else, provided, of
course, that he got a good deal more rent than simply enough to cover exhaustion by
wastage and obsolescence.
But suppose he were asked, instead, to lend a mortgage for the full value of such a house,
to enable someone else to build it to rent out to still a third person.
It is obvious that, in order to induce him to do this, the interest rate offered would
have to be equal to the presumptive rent of the house, minus the annual estimated depreciation,
compensation for the worry and trouble of management, the landlord function, and relative
protection against the risks of vacancy and of real estate speculation.
The mortgagee's return, in short, is intimately connected with the prospective return of the
legal owner of the building.
This is merely a special case of the constant close relationship between the rate of interest
and the marginal yield of specific capital goods.
If the intended mortgagee were not offered such a return, he would not lend the money.
If the builder of the house were not allowed to charge a rent, making it worthwhile, he
would not build houses, either with his own money or somebody else's.
How then would Keynes force down interest rates and even the return to the entrepreneur
and still get his saving, investment and production?
What he really has in mind, apparently, is seizing the money through taxation and creating
forced investment through the government.
Does my assumption go too far?
Then listen to this.
Though this state of affairs, just about enough return to cover cost of capital replacement,
would be quite compatible with some measures of individualism, yet it would mean the euthanasia
of the rentier, and consequently the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist
to exploit the scarcity value of capital, pages 375 through 376.
For the light it throws on the heart of Keynes's message and on the popularity of his ideas
Among Leftists, this sentence is one of the most revealing in the book.
Notice how patronizingly individualism, i.e. individual liberty, is treated.
Keynes would graciously allow some measure of it, but he insists on the euthanasia of
the rentier.
Euthanasia means painless death.
That is, the death of the rentier would be painless to Keynes.
There is an old proverb that if you want to hang a dog, you must first call him mad.
If you want to knock a man down, you should first give him a bad name.
So Keynes uses the French rentier as a smear word.
The rentier is the terrible fellow who saves a little money and puts it in a savings bank,
For he buys a bond of United States Steel and uses his cumulative oppressive power as
a capitalist to exploit the U.S. Steel Corporation.
All this is demagogy and claptrap.
It differs from the Marxist brand only in technical detail.
Robbing the Productive
Interest today, Keynes goes on, rewards no genuine sacrifice any more than does the rent
of land.
The owner of capital can obtain interest because capital is scarce, just as the owner of land
can obtain rent because land is scarce.
But whilst there may be intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of land, there can be no
intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital.
Even so, it will still be possible for communal saving through the agency of the state to
be maintained at a level which will allow the growth of capital up to the point where
it ceases to be scarce.
Page 376
How does Keynes know that interest rewards no genuine sacrifice?
Certainly savers and moderate circumstances are constantly making sacrifices of immediate
gratifications in order to save for a home, for the education of their children, or against
possible ill health.
What does Keynes know about the individual sacrifices, abstentions and choices of individual
savers?
And does the rent of land reward no genuine sacrifice?
Doesn't Keynes know that the capital and rental value of most land in the civilized world
Today is in large part the result of the capital that has gone into the roads and other communications
that lead to it, as well as the clearing, leveling, draining, irrigation, plowing, fertilization
and building that have been put into it, all at a capital cost.
What does Keynes mean when he declares that there are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity
of capital?
The greatest and sufficient intrinsic reason, the fact that, in America, for example, there
was no capital at all when we got here, and all of it had to be created by somebody, by
some people's hard work and saving, even if some of them wouldn't have been admitted into
the Bloomsbury Circle.
There is still scarcity of capital, simply and solely because not enough of it has been
Incidentally, people are not rewarded in economic life for sacrifice, but simply for producing
something that somebody else wants enough to be willing to pay for.
I don't pay the General Motors Corporation $3,000 to reward its sacrifice in producing
and Oldsmobile, I pay it because I want the Oldsmobile.
If a man turns out something that you or I don't want, we are not interested in how much
sacrifice his product cost him.
It is not up to us to reward him for producing something for which we can find no use.
In Keynes's topsy-turvy economics, in which only genuine sacrifice is rewarded, we would
pay nothing to an inventor, musical composer, artist or author unless he could prove that
he didn't actually enjoy inventing, composing, painting or writing.
To say that the owner of capital or the owner of land exploits scarcity is merely an ominous
way of saying that all economic value is scarcity value.
A market price for anything whatever can be obtained only because that thing is relatively
scarce in the sense that it is not a free gift of nature.
Keynes's economics of abundance for capital goods could be set down as a dream world if
it were not for the final sentence from Keynes quoted above.
There he tacitly admits that savings and capital will not be forthcoming on the practically
non-existent return that he proposes.
But then, ah, the state steps in, the magical state, seizes the capital through taxation
and does its own investing.
Only the long-run result of this, of course, would be to reduce production and to make
real capital scarcer than ever.
Keynes goes on.
I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear
when it has done its work.
Page 376.
This sentence implies the Hegelian-Marxian stage theory of history, except that nothing
previous in the theory of Keynes explains what the work of the rentier aspect actually
According to his theory, the Ranthier always demanded a rate of interest that was too high,
and for some inscrutable reason was able to get it.
As the Ranthier, in brief, according to Keynesian theory, never had any excuse for existing
in the first place, he never did any work except to hold up economic progress and produce
Unemployment.
And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect, Keynes goes on, much else in it besides
will suffer a sea-change.
It will be, moreover, a great advantage of the order of events which I am advocating,
that the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing sudden,
Nearly a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain
and will need no revolution, page 376.
This is all very reassuring.
The Rontier will be killed off quietly because he will be unable to offer any resistance,
and Britain will enjoy that marvelous prosperity that followed her adoption of the Keynesian
and Remedies.
Although, after years of cheap money following the appearance of the General Theory, a bank
rate of 2% in 1937, 1948, 1950, etc., the Bank of England was finally forced to tighten
up to a discount rate of 7% in September of 1957.
But what about the functionless investor?
Here, I think, Keynes' pen inadvertently slipped.
The investor, by his previous definition, has hitherto been his hero, his entrepreneur,
exploited by that real villain, the saver.
Did not the investor serve a function by earning and saving enough to become an investor?
Did he not serve another function by making a choice of which project or firm to invest
in and which not to invest in?
But Keynes is really waxing eloquent now, and we should not interrupt him by these trivial
questions.
He goes on, Thus we might aim in practice, there being
nothing in this which is unattainable, at an increase in the volume of capital until
until it ceases to be scarce, so that the functionless investor will no longer receive
a bonus, and at a scheme of direct taxation which allows the intelligence and determination
and executive skill of the financier, the entrepreneur ad hoc genus omni, who are certainly
so fond of their craft that their labor could be obtained much cheaper than at present,
to be harnessed to the service of the community on reasonable terms of reward, p. 376-377.
In reply, it may be pointed out that capital will cease to be scarce only when it ceases
to have value, so that anybody will be willing to give it away.
It will cease to have value only when it either costs nothing to produce, or when it's
This application ceases to reduce the costs, including time, of production of anything,
or when the consumer goods that it helps to turn out themselves cease to be scarce and
to have value, all of which conditions are impossible.
The application of capital increases technological progress, and technological progress itself
makes old machines and materials obsolete at the expense of new machines and materials.
So, capital, by aiding progress, automatically increases the need and value and scarcity
of new capital for new applications.
Keynes's scheme of direct taxation is a scheme to rob the productive in order to reward the
unproductive.
It tries to exploit the fact that certain entrepreneurs, like certain poets, musicians,
artists, scientists, are fond of their craft.
But the attempt to exploit these, to treat them like draft horses, to pay them just enough
to keep them working, would have one flaw.
Other entrepreneurs work primarily for the rewards in it, and when these are cut down
and below a sufficient inducement, they play golf or choose some other alternative, as
the results of the expropriatory rates of the existing income tax are proving every
day.
It is obvious from Keynes's tone that he had an ill-concealed contempt, as befitted a member
of the Bloomsbury Circle for the business entrepreneur.
means concludes this section by writing.
It would remain for separate decision on what scale and by what means it is right and reasonable
to call on the living generation to restrict their consumption so as to establish, in course
of time, a state of full investment for their successors.
Page 377.
But people have already been deciding this question as individuals and voluntarily and
not by collective compulsion, except through progressive income and inheritance taxes and
so-called state investment.
Having rejected the voluntary solution, Keynes is forced to look for a solution through compulsion,
such as that made by totalitarian governments.
Incidentally, full investment, as we have seen, is a silly and meaningless phrase.
It fails to recognize the illimitable improvements that are always possible in quality,
and it is based on purely static assumptions.
What becomes of full investment in a particular machine, for example,
When a new machine or process is invented that makes the old one obsolete.
The Socialization of Investment And now Keynes has a few kind and condescending
words to say about a free and voluntary economic system, but beware of Keynes when he brings
as Gifts.
In some other respects, he begins, the foregoing theory is moderately conservative in its implications.
There are wide fields of activity which are unaffected, pages 377 through 378.
Of course, the state will have to increase the propensity to consume, i.e., discourage
and it must fix, i.e. lower the rate of interest, and there must be a somewhat comprehensive
socialization of investment, but beyond this, no obvious case can be made out for a system
of state socialism which would embrace most of the economic life of the community.
Page 378 It is hard to believe that Keynes is as naïve
as he pretends, and that he is not laughing up his sleeve.
The rate of interest, the valuation of time and of all investments, is to be taken out
of the market and put completely in the hands of the State.
But Keynes ignores the complete interconnectedness of all prices.
This especially includes the price of capital loans, any state tinkering with which must
necessarily affect and distort all prices and price relationships throughout the economy.
Through its socialized investment, moreover, the state would decide which firms or industries
to expand and which to freeze or contract.
Even though the state did not technically own the instruments of production, this would
lead to a de facto socialism.
Keynes continues, But if our central controls succeed in establishing an aggregate volume
of output corresponding to full employment as nearly as practicable, the classical theory
comes into its own again from this point onwards, page 378.
Let's see, the free market system, which is what Keynes means by the classical theory,
is incapable, according to him, of properly fixing the volume of money and credit, or
the proper rate of interest, or the right volume and direction of investment, or the
The Right Volume of Output or Adequate Employment, but outside of that very little can be said
against it.
Yet Keynesians solemnly cite selected sentences of the sort I have just quoted in order to
prove that Keynes was really a conservative and, aside from one or two minor reservations,
a disciple of the classical economy.
It is worth noting that though he talks constantly in this chapter as in others of full employment,
he never mentions excessive wage rates as a possible cause of unemployment or suggests
any government interference with them.
These are to be left, as before, to the labor union leaders, which are to continue to enjoy
Legal Privileges and Immunities Denied to All Other Groups
If we suppose the volume of output to be given, Keynes continues, i.e. to be determined by
forces outside the classical scheme of thought, then private self-interest will determine
what in particular is produced, in what proportions the factors of production will be combined
to Produce It and How the Value of the Final Product Will Be Distributed Between Them,
pages 378 through 379.
This passage is an obvious self-contradiction.
If the state determines how much will be invested, at what interest rate and just where, it necessarily
Determines What in Particular is Produced and With What Factors.
Keynes's scheme would take all of this out of private hands.
He merely refuses to recognize the implications of his own proposals.
Keynes continues his patronizing attitude toward personal liberty.
There will still remain a wide field for the exercise of private initiative
and Responsibility, Within This Field the Traditional Advantages of Individualism Will
Still Hold Good, page 380.
I suppose one example of this would be the progressive income tax, so warmly approved
by Keynes, which, in the United States, at the time of writing, rises to 91% on the highest
Let us stop for a moment, Keynes goes on, to remind ourselves what these advantages are.
They are partly advantages of efficiency.
The advantages of decentralization and of the play of self-interest.
The advantage to efficiency of the decentralization of decisions and of individual responsibility
is even greater, perhaps, than the nineteenth century supposed.
And the reaction against the appeal to self-interest may have gone too far.
Page 380 Well, after 379 pages talking about all the
alleged damage done by individual responsibility and self-interest, it seems a little late
on the fourth page from the end to begin a retraction.
All this is, of course, only another self-contradiction.
control of the volume of saving, of interest rates and of investment centralizes the key
decisions, leaving only derivative and much less important decisions to individuals.
But above all, Keynes continues, individualism, if it can be purged of its defects and its
abuses, is the best safeguard of personal liberty in the sense that, compared with any
and Other System, it greatly widens the field for the exercise of personal choice, page
380.
This sententious declaration is mere tautology.
Individualism not only safeguards personal liberty, it means personal liberty.
And personal liberty means, of course, among other things, the freedom to exercise personal
choice.
The abuses and defects of which individualism is to be purged are, I presume, all the actions
or decisions of which the bureaucrats happen to disapprove.
Keynes then goes on to praise, in a patronizing manner, the variety of life which emerges
from this extended field of personal choice.
But this whole passage on page 380 and the whole chapter, in fact, is a series of self-contradictions.
In it, Keynes tries to get the best of both worlds, to insist on a government-controlled
economy and to call it individualism and freedom of enterprise.
As to his praise of variety, why not competition and variety in interest rates, or competition
and variety in investments?
Why not the exercise of personal choice in making one's own investments with the money
one has earned?
Whilst, therefore, Keynes goes on, the enlargement of the functions of government would seem
According to a 19th century publicist or to a contemporary American financier, to be a
terrific encroachment on individualism, I defend it, on the contrary, both as the only
practicable means of avoiding the destruction of existing economic forms in their entirety,
and as the condition of the successful functioning of individual initiative.
Page 380 In other words, the way to preserve individualism is to reject it, and in a central
field, for investment is a key decision in the operation of any economic system.
And government investment is a form of socialism.
Only confusion of thought or deliberate duplicity would deny this.
For socialism, as any dictionary would tell the Keynesians, means the ownership and control
of the means of production by the government.
Under the system proposed by Keynes, the government would control all investment in the means
of production and would own the part it had itself directly invested.
It is at best mere muddleheadedness, therefore, to present the Keynesian nostrums as a free
enterprise or individualistic alternative to socialism.
There follows a paragraph in which Keynes declares that,
If effective demand is deficient, not only is the public scandal of wasted resources
is intolerable, but the individual enterpriser who seeks to bring these resources into action
is operating with the odds loaded against him.
The players as a whole will lose.
Hitherto the increment of the world's wealth has fallen short of the aggregate of positive
individual savings, and the difference has been made up by the losses of those whose
Average courage and initiative have not been supplemented by exceptional skill or unusual
good fortune, but if effective demand is adequate, average skill and average good fortune will
be enough, pages 380 through 381.
There is not a sentence in this quotation that is not based on some wrong assumption.
Keynes' concept of wasted resources, as W.H. Hutt has shown, will not stand critical examination.
There is much less real waste in frankly recognizing past malinvestment and either scrapping it
or allowing it to become periodically idle than in trying to conceal its existence by
by a Continuing Inflation or by Throwing Good Resources After Bad.
There is also, as Hut has shown, a great deal of pseudo-idleness, as in lawnmowers or phonographs
or evening clothes which are used only occasionally and whose services consist in their availability.
Mises particularly forgets this important availability service when he refers to cash
balances as hoarded money.
Once again, net real profits by concept and definition can go at best under normal or
static conditions only to the more foresighted, skillful or fortunate half of all entrepreneurs.
The average entrepreneur tends to make just enough profit to compensate for the price of
his own services if he worked for somebody else.
The entrepreneurs with less than average foresight, skill or luck will find themselves with losses.
Only the better than average will achieve real profits.
This general situation is not improved by continuous inflation, but merely concealed.
The true situation is revealed again when allowance is made for the average lost purchasing
power of money incomes received.
Keynes offers no support whatever for his belief that the increment of the world's
World's Wealth has fallen short of the aggregate of positive individual savings.
If this contention is true, it tends to show that the rate of interest, instead of being
chronically too high, as Keynes never tires of repeating, has been chronically too low
to compensate for risks.
But the enormous increase in the world's wealth and the vast accumulation of capital, say,
In America alone, since the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620, hardly support his contention.
The Economic Causes of War
Keynes now follows with a section in which he offers his nastrum as a remedy for removing
the alleged economic causes of war.
Strangely enough, he blames domestic laissez-faire and an international gold standard as the
causes of the competitive struggle for markets, page 382, between nations.
All this, of course, is the exact opposite of the truth.
Under an international gold standard and freedom of trade, there was a competition between
Individuals or between firms for foreign and domestic business, but not between nations
as such.
Several American firms might bid against each other for a foreign contract, and if German
firms were also bidding for it, they would be competing with each other as much as with
the American firms.
It is nationalism, it is the nonsensical concept of a balance of trade that does not take care
of itself but can only be obtained by government intervention that causes the nationalistic
struggle for markets.
Keynes denounces international trade as of the time that he was writing as a desperate
It is quite expedient to maintain employment at home by forcing sales on foreign markets
and restricting purchases, whereas, under Keynesian economics, if nations can learn
to provide themselves with full employment by their domestic policy, there need be no
important economic forces calculated to set the interest of one country against that of
of its Neighbors, p. 382-383 None of this bears much relation to the truth.
Under a system of laissez-faire, i.e. free trade at home and free trade abroad, and an
international gold standard, individuals buy what they need wherever they can get it cheapest.
They sell in the best market.
They do not think nationalistically, and so far as the international gold standard is concerned,
nations can stay on it only by keeping their interest rates and their obligations in terms
of gold in equilibrium with those prevailing in the rest of the world.
It is precisely the Keynesian system, with its nationalistic fixing of interest rates,
with its domestic inflationism and its tricky devaluations of national currencies that turns
the struggle for a favorable balance of trade and for foreign markets into an international
struggle.
And it is precisely because this system seeks to maintain full employment by domestic currency,
Post-Rate and Investment Tricks, by disregarding the imbalance of production so brought about,
and by disregarding the loss from failure to take full advantage of the international division
of labor, that it is also a far less efficient system.
The Power of Ideas
We have been forced to be critical, and sometimes harshly so, about every chapter of Keynes's
general theory and every leading proposition it contains.
I am sorry for this for more reasons than one.
The present book would have been much shorter, the author would have been saved many dreary
hours of analysis, and the reader's time would also have been economized if there were
There are fewer propositions and deductions in the general theory, with which one was
forced to disagree.
So it is with special pleasure that I turn to the final paragraph of the general theory,
for here at last we are able to say that Keynes has written something profoundly true and
wise and memorably eloquent.
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are
wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood.
Indeed, the world is ruled by a little else.
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences,
are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
Mad men in authority who hear voices in the air are distilling their frenzy from some
academic scribbler of a few years back.
I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual
encroachment of ideas.
Not indeed immediately, but after a certain interval, for in the field of economic and
and Political Philosophy, there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they
are 25 or 30 years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even
agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest.
But soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or
evil.
And what a crowning irony that the defunct economist and academic scribbler of a few
years back, whose ideas are being applied by civil servants and politicians and agitators,
should now be none other than John Maynard Keynes himself.