I want to get back to the topic of the Keynes project. I am not trying to convince you to put up any money, or write a book, or do anything more than just understand what I am trying to get at.
The Keynes project needs to be a comprehensive project. That is to say, it is my dream of a comprehensive project. How comprehensive? We already have an operational model: the work of Lew Rockwell. Rockwell has extended what Leonard E. Read began in 1946 at the Foundation for Economic Education. Rockwell has created a comprehensive program to promote the ideas of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. This involves the publishing of comprehensive books summarizing the position. It involves creating short introductory books on this or that aspect of the position. It involves a comprehensive website that is filled with materials related to the position. It involves dealing with the daily issues raised by Mises and Rothbard as they apply in multiple areas of life.
This goes way beyond what Mises ever thought about, but it is consistent with what Rothbard thought about and did on a regular basis. In other words, it is a comprehensive program. It does not just call for a reform of central banking, or some other limited reform. Rockwell understands the fundamental position that is best stated as follows: "You cannot change just one thing." He understands that this is a comprehensive reform program.
What he cannot deal with is this: politics. He can oppose political moves to stifle liberty, but, with the exception of Ron Paul, he has not believed that political reform is viable. He never really believed it was with Ron Paul, either, but he fully understood that Ron Paul could serve as a kind of lightning rod for the ideas of Murray Rothbard.
Mises was a classical liberal. He did believe in political action. He never produced any books on actual politics. He never produced much on anything beyond limited economic topics. He never extended himself much beyond his economic theories on how the free market operates. He was a highly focused economist. He was a specialist. He did not get into literature, popular culture, political movements, and so forth. Rothbard did.
But, because Rothbard opposed all coercion, he opposed the state. This is why it was strange that he helped start the Libertarian Party. Of course, the leaders eventually threw him out. So did the Cato Institute. But if you do not believe the state can be reformed, it really does not matter if the Libertarian Party throws you out, or if Cato throws you out. The Libertarian Party and Cato are committed to the idea of the legitimacy of the state. If you do not believe in the state, why should you care if you get tossed out of pro-state organizations?
Anyway, what Rockwell has done with everything except politics is what is needed in every reform program. You have to have a comprehensive message based on a limited set of ultimate presuppositions: axioms, as Mises called them. Your limited set of presuppositions has to be identifiable. It has to be systematic. It has to be applicable to the real world in every area of life. In other words, it has to be a package deal.
MARXISM AND KEYNESIANISM
Marxism was a comprehensive philosophy. It involved every area of life. It was able to gain political traction through a series of revolutions. It was a serious contender, for it gained control over something like one-third of the world's population by 1950. Then, overnight, Deng Xiaoping in 1978 pulled the plug on Communism in the field of economics. The greatest beneficiary of this plug-pulling has been China. Then, in 1991, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union did the same thing. So ended the Marxist experiment, unless you still count North Korea.
When I wrote my book criticizing Marxism, which was published in 1968, I challenged Marxism as a comprehensive system of social thought. I was hardly the first to do this. It was clear to leaders involved in the fight, beginning in the 1880s, that opponents had to have a comprehensive world-and-life view in order to challenge Marxism successfully, for Marxism offered a comprehensive world-and-life view. It was system versus system. Opponents could not beat something with nothing.
There were comprehensive programs to refute Marxism. There were books, pamphlets, movies, and study groups. I grew up in such a world. I was introduced to conservatism and libertarianism by an anti-Communist lady who was part of the Southern California anti-Communist study groups movement, which was amazingly well organized by a group of hundreds of women, given the fact that they never had much money, and the ladies rarely had good educations. They knew how to fight Communism. I am not saying that Communism fell because of their work, but certainly they understood the comprehensive nature of the Communist challenge, and they really did attempt to provide refutations of Communism in every area of life. It was a battle for the minds of men. Those women understood this.
Anti-Keynesians do not understand this. They do not understand that Keynesian is a comprehensive view of the nature of civil government. They do not understand that they are dealing with a comprehensive world-and-life view, which is vastly more than the technical issues in Keynes's General Theory. Keynesianism is like Marxism. It is not just about economics. It is part of a comprehensive view of the nature of civil government.
Somebody writes a monograph on this or that aspect of Keynes. Then he stops writing about Keynes. Someone else writes a general introductory critique of Keynes, and then he stops writing. Each critic thinks and hopes that his little book, or his medium-sized book, is going to make a difference. He goes after some technical aspect of Keynesian economics, and he thinks he has made a contribution. He has merely produced a small brick. There is chaos in the brickyard.
We have yet to see anybody who has recognized the extent to which the Keynesian system is not just about technical economics. It is about a particular view of civil government, which is ultimately redemptive. It is a belief, in four words, that government deficits eliminate recessions. But this has a specific view of how civil government should operate, and also has a specific view of what civil government is capable of achieving. It is not just a series of arguments, which were incoherent from day one, that became the basis of the Keynesian movement. The Keynesian movement is in fact a kind of priesthood within an overall view of life that declares that civil government is redemptive. Until we understand this, we will not understand Keynesianism.
People trained in free market economic theory can recognize this or that error in Keynesian economic theory, but their monographs do not achieve much of anything. Why not? Because the monographs are not part of a comprehensive effort to overturn a complete system of philosophy, a system that is comprehensive and vastly more influential today than Communism ever was. Keynesianism has conquered the world.
I personally think that Keynesianism is a subset of Left-wing social Darwinism. But here we have problems, because a lot of Austrian economists are Darwinists. So, they do not want to get into this aspect of the battle. In any case, this much clearly is true: Keynesianism is a package deal, and this package deal extends way beyond the many incoherent passages in The General Theory, as well as the complex but irrelevant formulas published in unread and unreadable scholarly journals written by economists in search of tenure.
I am calling on someone to devote his entire life to refuting the whole of Keynesian economics in a systematic form. This project involves a comprehensive frontal assault against every aspect of Keynesian economic theory. No such attempt has ever been made. People did it with Marx. They understood that you had to refute Marx across the board. Eventually, Marxism fell of its own incoherence and incompetence. Marxism fell because it could not deliver the goods. But Marxism did not fall because one person wrote a book on Marx. I speak from experience. I wrote such a book.
Keynesianism is larger than Keynes. Marxism was larger than Marx. Keynesianism is a package deal. Marxism was a package deal. Like Marxism, Keynesianism requires a frontal assault across a long offensive line. Keynesianism is dominant. Keynesianism is comprehensive. Keynesianism affects every nook and cranny of the modern world. Above all, Keynesianism is dead wrong.
There is going to be a crisis of Keynesianism that is comparable to the crisis that Marxism had between 1978 and 1991. Keynesianism is going to produce a gigantic catastrophe economically, and then the question will be this: "Who has a clear, comprehensive, all-encompassing program that can be used to rebuild the economies of the world from the ground up, through voluntary action, through contract, and through education?"
You cannot beat something with nothing. I keep coming back to this slogan. Lew Rockwell understands it with respect to Austrian economics. But there is an inherent division within Austrian economics. That division is between Mises and Rothbard. Mises believed in civil government; Rothbard did not. There is a major division right down the middle of the Austrian economics camp.
What I am saying is this: to refute Keynes is a lifetime job for somebody with intellectual skills and the ability to communicate. He has to devote himself to multiple media. Nobody else is going to do it. We have waited since 1936. So, it is inherently a one-man project. It is a fire-in-the-belly project. It is a thankless project. It is an all-consuming project. And it has to be done by somebody, if only to prove that it can be done.
But that is only the first step. Once you erode the foundation of Keynes, you must re-think everything else. You cannot change just one thing. This, nobody wants to do. Nobody even wants to begin work on the first stage, which is to provide a comprehensive refutation of Keynes, in every area of Keynes's thought, and to conduct this campaign in multiple media. Yet that is only the first step.
CONCLUSION
If you say that Keynesianism is wrong, and you also understand that Keynesianism is comprehensively applied in virtually every country across the face of the earth by means of central banks, then by saying that Keynesianism has to be rejected, you are of necessity saying that central banking has to be rejected. That means that the whole social and political order has to be rejected.
It is like a demolition expert who has a plan to blow up a dike in the Netherlands. He will drill into it, insert an explosive, and detonate the explosive. Somebody replies that this would let water flood the community. The demolition man says: "That's not my department."
We need someone who says this: "That is my department. Here is my manual. Here is my DVD training series. Here is my recruiting program. Here is my website."
What is going to happen is the dike is going to collapse of its own accord, just as the Marxist dike did. It is going to be just like the Soviet Union in 1991.
Rothbard was right in the aftermath of that collapse. He said that nobody had ever provided a comprehensive plan to replace Communism behind the Iron Curtain. Then, the Iron Curtain collapsed. Nobody had a plan or even the outline of a plan on either side of the Iron Curtain. He offered one in 1992, but no one listened. So, what happened? Putin took over. That is not what I would call a free market solution.
When Keynesianism collapses, we hope that the world will do better than replacing it with some version of Putin.
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