J. M. Keynes: An Anti-Semitic Economic Crackpot
John Maynard Keynes is universally regarded as the most influential economist of the twentieth century. This assessment is correct.
His 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, baptized the deficit spending programs that the Western governments had been following -- without success -- ever since 1930. His conclusion: more of the same. Lots more of the same.
Because the West's intelligentsia and its politicians wanted to hear that, they adopted him as the patron saint of government spending. He therefore became untouchable. The cover-ups began. The Web has made the following more difficult to conceal.
Professors do not go out of their way to point out to their students that Keynes did not earn a degree in economics. He earned a B.A. in math. He never received a graduate degree.
They cover up the fact that he got his job in the economics department at Cambridge because of nepotism. His father, J. N. Keynes, was on the faculty. The head of the department, Alfred Marshall, put up the money to give him a lectureship. He was 27 years old. They made him a fellow in 1911, at the age of 29.
They immediately made him editor of The Economic Journal, the most prestigious academic economics journal in Great Britain. He held that position until 1944. So, if you wanted your article published in The Economic Journal, you did it Keynes' way.
Nice work if you can get it, and if you get it, tell me how.
They all knew of his homosexuality. They covered it up. The fact did not become public knowledge until the publication of Michael Holroyd's two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey in 1967, an obscure book that became an instant sensation when the facts on Keynes became public.
He lived a charmed life.
He was an economic crackpot. He was an anti-Semite. Only this year has the latter become public knowledge. The cover-up has lasted a long time.
ANTI-SEMITIC ECONOMIC CRACKPOTS
On the fringes of the Right wing in America there is a very special movement. It is crackpot to the core. It believes that the Jews are behind everything bad. Even worse, the Jews are making a potful of money doing it. This really annoys them.
Not all Jews, of course. Not the guy who runs the local deli, who makes the terrific corned beef sandwiches. He's merely a circumcised dupe. It's the other kind. The secret ones. The cartel. The Power behind the powers.
In the 1890's, the anti-semitic crackpots in America gravitated toward the Left. The Greenback movement in the early 1880s had its share of them. The Greenback Party died in the late 1880s, and some of its members joined the Populist Party. This was a Left-wing movement. The anti-semitic elements in the Populist movement were discussed half a century ago in Richard Hofstadter's book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
Early in the twentieth century, the crackpots began spreading out. The creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 was a springboard for them. Not all were anti-semites, but some of them were. The most famous example in American history was Father Coughlin in the 1930s. He was a Left-wing radio priest. He was a true crackpot in the Greenback tradition. He had a huge audience.
The heart of the Greenback movement is the economic equivalent of the perpetual motion machine. The Greenbackers believe that an economy can operate in terms of zero interest. This is the classic mark of the monetary crank.
The heart of their error is this: a belief that money is the same as capital. Money can be free and should be free. Fiat money guarantees free money when issued by the government. Therefore, the government can provide free capital.
But it doesn't. Why not? Bankers. And we know which kind of bankers, don't we? Yes, we do.
NO FREE FUTURE LUNCHES
The Austrian school of economics was founded on the idea that interest is a phenomenon of human action. This goes back to the late 19th century writings by Eugen Böhm-Bawerk. He described interest as a discount that we apply in the present to the expected value of scarce economic resources in the future. His disciple Ludwig von Mises extended this insight throughout his career.
Mises called this discount time preference. For example, you will not give up five one-ounce gold coins today for someone's promise to return five one-ounce coins ten years from now, free of charge. Why would you give up something you own now in order to receive back the economic equivalent ten years from now? You would lose control over the asset for ten years. Why surrender this control? You do not have any economic reason -- other than charity -- for giving up an asset now, merely to receive it back in ten years. The only economic justification for this would be that somebody is storing the asset for you free of charge. But why would he do this? There are no free lunches. Storage is never free.
This means that you apply a discount to the expected value of any future asset. An asset is worth more today than a physically identical or economically identical asset is worth in the future. Ownership today is more valuable than ownership in the future.
This is an extremely simple idea to understand. But there are a lot of people who do not understand it, and when they first hear about "zero-interest money," they are immediately attracted to it. Here is something for nothing. Why, they had thought all these years that they would have to pay for anything valuable, and it turns out that they really do not have to pay after all. They can get something for nothing. They have wanted something for nothing all of their lives, and here it is, right under their noses.
THEM BANKERS
But then they find out that a nefarious group is keeping them from getting something for nothing. These people are called bankers. The bankers have gotten together and somehow rigged the entire world economy to keep us from getting something for nothing. We are not getting our money's worth -- our free money's worth! Something has to be done about it. The government has to do something about it. Somebody has got to stop them bankers.
There is a subset of these people. These people are convinced that it is not just the bankers who are doing this. It is the very special bankers who are doing this. It is the bankers' bankers who are doing this. It is, lo and behold, the Rothschilds.
In other words, it's them Jews. It's them Jews again. It's always them Jews. Them Jews is everywhere. Them Jews is everything bad. Them Jews is rich. Them Jews. Them Jews. Them Jews.
Get them Jews!
You think I am exaggerating. I am exaggerating only with respect to grammar. Admittedly, they have better control of grammar. They do not have control of anything else. Logic is beyond them. Historical facts are beyond them. And everywhere they look are Jews.
Here is a recent example:
"But the bottom line is that central banks do the bidding of the Money Power. It originated in Babylon and spread through the world via Jewish Supremacism. It hides within Jewry and behind other proxies, most notably Freemasonry and the Vatican. And of course the Banking Cartel, which is a global, monolithic bloc. Through banking, it also controls all major industries. This power base allows them to control every Government and every Nation on the Globe and they are looking to externalize the Hierarchy in a New World Order.
This was written by a crackpot named Anthony Migchels. One of the ways that you can spot a crackpot is by the number of capitalized words in a paragraph. Crackpots live in a peculiar mental world. They are surrounded by powers. But these powers always lead to a single power: the Power behind the powers. These people believe that there is a trail that leads, power by power, to this power, which they usually capitalize: Power. To mark the trail to this Power, they capitalize words. To identify all of the many mini-powers along the way to the supreme power -- sorry: Supreme Power -- you must capitalize words.
Let me give you another example from the aforementioned crackpot. There are a lot of capital letters here.
The CommonsPerhaps the simplest thing to say is that Money is part of the Commons, like Water, Air, and Land.
We see how the Transnationals are now attacking Water as part of the Commons. Water is 'not a human right'. Land has long ago been privatized. But Land and Monetary Reform are in many respects the same fights and we can add Water to the equation too.
Money has never been fully appreciated as an intrinsic part of the Commons. Because so few people actually realized that the nature of Money was something we could think about. And those that did were mostly led astray by the silly 'theories' the Money Power keeps inventing.
The rape of the Commons, our Human Heritage, must end and we must reclaim what rightfully belongs to us. Why are we paying rents on Land and Money and soon Water to ancient families, Corporations and Governments?
Instead of benefiting from our fair share we are simply exchanging ever more of our labor for it. The invisible slavery to artificial scarcity.
The Commons by nature should serve the individual, families, tribes and the Commonwealth and no one can own them or exploit them for their own purposes.
In the literary world of crackpottery, there must be at least one capital letter in every sentence.
If you read that extract carefully, you discover that the author believes that there really is no good reason for scarcity. Defined technically, such a scarcity-free world exhibits this feature: "At zero price, supply equals demand." This is the classic mark of the crackpot. This is the touchstone. This is the neon sign that says: Crackpot Central. This is a movement in search of a perpetual motion machine, which the Jews secretly own. If there were a movie about these people, it could be called Searching for Rumplestiltstein.
And among crackpots, the really hard-core cases are the promoters of this theory of artificially imposed scarcity: Them Jews Done It. Conclusion: "Let's take it back from them Jews. Let's get our free goods."
It is not just that the disciples of these people move their lips when they read. It is that they also drool.
THE NITWIT NETWORK
I was first introduced to this line of reasoning in the late 1950s. My father was an FBI agent. He had a group of informants who had infiltrated tiny Marxist outfits that the FBI monitored. While he never called his informants this, one of his fellow agents had a very good title for his own group of informants: the nitwit network. My father always appreciated that designation.
One of his informants was a believer in the IJBC. I met him on several occasions. He was a used trailer salesman. He handed me a copy of a booklet titled Money Made Mysterious. It was a compilation of articles from the American Mercury. The American Mercury had been taken over in 1953 by an anti-Semitic Greenbacker. He also gave me a copy of one of the classic underground books in the conservative movement, The Beasts of the Apocalypse, by Olivia Maria O'Grady. I looked on Amazon to see if this book is still around. It is. There was one review. It was five stars. The reviewer wrote:
I read this book many years ago. It opened my eyes to the much undiscussed roll of the Jewish Nation in Western History. This book only deals with the darker side of that history. It is a shocker and a page-turner of a book! The book is critical and reads a bit like "Under the Sign of the Scorpion" by Juri Lina. Brace yourself.
Note this phrase: "the roll of the Jewish Nation." Is this like a drum roll? Or is it more like a bagel? Also note the capital letters.
The heart, mind, and soul of every monetary crank is this presupposition: scarcity is imposed by evil, greedy people, who are getting rich on the spread between "free" and "something." The real world is not marked by scarcity. The real world is a true cornucopia of free goods for all. But, because of a nefarious conspiratorial group, we live in a world of artificially imposed scarcity. If we can just identify exactly how these people have learned how to make a buck -- a lot of bucks -- out of artificially imposed scarcity, we can return to the world of the garden of Eden.
Marxists believe that capitalism is the source of this artificially imposed scarcity. The Greenbackers believe that it is the Money Power (capitalized). On the fringes of the Greenbackers, whether Right-wing or Left-wing, are those who have discovered the IJBC. These are the hardest of hard-core residents of the world of economic crackpottery.
KEYNES
John Maynard Keynes was a soft-core economic crackpot. You have to get through most of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money to get to the core of his crackpottery. On page 376, you find it: "But whilst there may be intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of land, there are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital." The paragraph concludes with this classic affirmation of crackpottery, one which his makes his disciples nervous: "But 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." His disciples, whenever they are aware of this passage (few people ever read The General Theory), dismiss it as not meaning what it obviously means. It is like watching Marxists explain away Marx's "On the Jewish Question." Bobby Fischer described this frantic wriggling. When he was asked as a teenager what he liked most about chess, he replied: "I love to see 'em squirm."
Keynes was a promoter of the economic theory underlying the crackpot monetary programs of Silvio Gesell and Major Douglas. Major Douglas during World War I founded the Social Credit movement, which insists on a federal welfare program to send out free money to everyone each month: a national dividend. Keynes praised Gesell and Douglas in The General Theory: pages 32 and 371. I gave a lecture on this to undergraduate college students at the Mises Institute.
But was Keynes a hard-core economic crackpot? You bet he was. He knew Shylocks when he saw them. Ben Steil, the Council on Foreign Relations' senior economist, makes this clear in a recent article for PBS. Keynes was obsessed with people who he said were obsessed with money. This meant Jews. (Shades of "On the Jewish Question"!)
Reflecting views that were not uncommon among his class at the time, he also saw this love as a particular pathology of a particular group: Jews. "I still think the race has shown itself, not merely for accidental reasons," he wrote to a polite American critic of his views, "more than normally interested in the accumulation of usury."
Keynes today is the world's most respected economic crackpot. The world is in the grip of an idea: Keynesianism. It is a very bad idea. The Keynesians pretend their founder was not a crackpot. They pretend they do not promote crackpottery. But their only way to justify this is to openly admit that the founder was a crackpot, and openly repudiate those aspects of The General Thjeory which are pure crackpottery. They refuse to do this. They have waited too long. To admit this now would be to admit that they just recently figured it out, that they and their predecessors were blind to what should have been obvious ever since 1936. They are trapped.
So is the world's economy.
For my recommended anti-Keynes project, click here: //www.garynorth.com/public/department135.cfm.
CONCLUSION
Monetary cranks hold to this view of banking: interest is an economically unnecessary payment. This payment is artificially imposed by bankers. The secret of wealth -- of mankind's liberty from scarcity -- is fiat money and interest-free loans. Fiat money is the same as capital. No interest payments are required to secure capital. "Free at last! Free at last! Great Fiat Almighty, we're free at last!"
I have written two books on this, which you can download for free: Gertrude Coogan's Bluff and Salvation Through Inflation. I have devoted a department on my website to it. //www.garynorth.com/public/department141.cfm.
Anthony Migchels is a crackpot's crackpot. He will no doubt say, as has said of the Mises Institute and Lewrockwell.com, that I am in the pay of the Money Power. He recently wrote this.
Considering what we've been reporting on, the millions behind Rockwell.com, Mises.org and the thousands of 'independent' 'free market' think-tanks and the simple fact that they had four paid elves with a hundred years of experience with Austrian Economics between them, located in Switzerland, this is absolutely fair to say.
There are thousands of free market think tanks, he says -- yes, thousands -- yet not one of them sends me money. The cheap S.O.B.'s who run the money power have not seen just how valuable I am. They are always after something for nothing. They think I am a free good. At zero price, my supply equals their demand. You can't trust these people.