Discretion will guard you, understanding will watch over you, to deliver you from the way of evil, from the man who speaks perverse things; from those who leave the paths of uprightness, to walk in the ways of darkness; who delight in doing evil, and who rejoice in the perversity of evil; whose paths are crooked, and who are devious in their ways (Proverbs 2:11-15, New American Standard Version).
British economist John Maynard Keynes is most famous for his quip, "In the long run we are all dead." This was his response to any criticism of his work that argued that the long-run consequences of his policies would be disastrous.
Keynes was the primary apologist for the economic policies that created today's world of high debt, fiat currencies, and a search for an internationally managed monetary system. He and Harry Dexter White designed the International Monetary Fund, which came out of the now-defunct Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. It was Keynesian economics that dominated the academic world in the post-World War II era.
Why did Keynes design a system--or better put, why did he recommend a series of disjointed policies--that would fail in the long run? Because he was committed as a way of life to the short run. This is understandable, for he was a dedicated homosexual.
Lewis Lehrman, the businessman-scholar-politician who has defended the traditional gold standard so eloquently, once remarked that the reason why he favors a free market economy based on gold, and Keynes didn't, is that he has a large family. He wants his children to inherit something. Keynes had no children to inherit anything.
The biblical and covenantal view of time, pro or con, is basic to one's selection of economic policies. Keynes was by sexual preference a short-run thinker. Those who follow his sexual recommendations today have adopted a much shorter view, given the life expectancy of those who contract AIDS.
In 1968, Michael Holroyd published his two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey, one of Keynes' "companions," which revealed the incredibly sordid lifestyle of the twentieth century's premier economist. Holroyd even cited Keynes letter recommending Tunisia as a marvelous place for a vacation because of the inexpensive "bed and boy" facilities available there.
Prior to this, the academic world had not known of Keynes' homosexuality. A few economists knew, and his biographer, Sir Roy Harrod, certainly knew. I interviewed F. A. Hayek in July of 1985, and I asked him about this. Hayek and Keynes had been academic rivals in the 1930's in England, and Hayek was on good terms with Keynes socially. He assured me that Harrod had known. But his friends who knew had remained discreet. In 1968, the story got out of the closet, but by then, academic economists no longer worried about such matters. Sexual enlightenment had arrived (but AIDS hadn't).
The Cambridge Apostles
In 1985, Richard Deacon's book appeared which deals with the Cambridge University secret society, the Cambridge Apostles. It revealed that this group was controlled by homosexuals throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, and that their most prestigious members in this era-John Maynard Keynes, G. Lowes Dickenson, G. E. Moore, and Lytton Strachey--were all dedicated homosexuals. So blatant was their public commitment to sodomy that Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb was concerned in 1911 when her protégé Bertrand Russell returned to Cambridge to teach, for he had been an Apostle as a student there in 1892, and she feared that he might get involved with them again: ". . . we have for a long time been aware of its bad influence on our young Fabians."
The Apostles was not simply some undergraduate club. Members continued to attend meetings for decades. In Keynes' fourth year at Cambridge, he became Secretary, yet there was only one undergraduate member." Like the powerful Yale University secret societies, Skull and Bones (George Bush, William Buckley, etc.) and Scroll and Key, membership was gained as an undergraduate, but the links continued throughout life.
Deacon's summary is important as an introduction to Ian Hodge's study of Keynesian economics, Baptized Inflation: "Homosexuality probably reached its peak in the Society when Strachey and Maynard Keynes formed a remarkable partnership in conducting its affairs. Here were two minds both devoted to achieving power and influence in their respective ways. Keynes himself was the chief protagonist of the homosexual cult, obsessed with the subject to an abnormal degree for one with a good intellect and wide interests. So obsessed, in fact, that when, years later, he married the Russian ballet dancer, Lydia Lopokova, the news was received with outraged horror among such friends. Some of them never forgave him; others maliciously speculated what was the real reason for the marriage. It slowly dawned on them that this was all part of Keynes's power game.
"'The Apostles repudiated entirely customary conventions and traditional wisdom,' declared a smug and at the same time delighted Keynes. 'We were in the strict sense of the term Immoralists.'"
Apostles' philosopher G. E. Moore had once announced in a paper read to the group: "In the beginning was matter, and matter begat the devil, and the devil begat God." How terribly clever! How revealingly perverse. He then went on to say that first God had died, then the devil, and now only matter remains. (That Moore is regarded as one of the half dozen major philosophers of this century testifies to the pathetic moral and intellectual character of this century.) It was within this moral and religious cesspool that Keynes emerged as co-master, along with Strachey. As in every cesspool, the large chunks rise to the top. Keynes was a very large chunk. "A product of Eton, where he displayed a great contempt for his examiners even though they regarded him highly, he brought to Cambridge a high degree of arrogance and assertion of personal superiority over his contemporaries. Surprisingly, this told in his favour rather than against him. Just as the mindless, sadistic public [English private] school bully held sway among the hearties, so did the intellectual bully (which was what Keynes was) dominate when he came to Kings [College, Cambridge]." The academic community has always had its share of masochistic wimps.
Keynes vs. Puritanism
Deacon continues: "Keynes was an ideal partner for Strachey. The two men were devoted to the same sexual cult and had the same contempt for conventional thought. But there was a difference between the two men. In Strachey's case this was more a question of perversity for its own sake than any carefully thought out philosophy. Keynes was reacting positively against the Puritan ethic: he hated Puritanism in any form and not the least in the form it had taken at Cambridge. Both men, however, regarded homosexuality as the supreme state of existence, 'passing Christian understanding,' and being superior to heterosexual relationships."
What has this got to do with Keynes' ideas on economics? A lot, argues Deacon: "Keynes's hatred of Puritanism is important in the light of his economic theories. He was to become the man who has gone down in history as the most outstanding economist and architect of social progress of the past seventy years, though some would dispute such an assessment. But it was his hostility to the puritan ethic which stimulated and lay behind his economic theories-spend to create work, spend one's way out of depression, stimulate growth. It was also his hatred of Puritanism which caused him in early life to devote rather more time to pursuing homosexual conquests than to economics. More positively, his papers to the Society were in the main nothing whatsoever to do with economics. One such paper, often cited, was on the subject of 'Beauty'."
Strachey wrote to Keynes: 'We can't be content with telling the truth-we must tell the whole truth, and the whole truth is the Devil. It's madness of us to dream of making dowagers understand that feelings are good, when we say in the same breath that the best ones are sodomitical."
Keynes' economic principles matched his moral principles: he didn't believe in them. He denied that fixed economic principles even exist. He testified in 1930 before a government commission:
All the same I am afraid of 'principle.' Ever since 1918 we, alone amongst the nations of the world, have been the slaves of 'sound' general principles regardless of particular circumstances. We have behaved as though the intermediate 'short periods' of the economist between our [one?] position of equilibrium and another were short, whereas they can be long enough --and have been before now-to encompass the decline and downfall of nations. Nearly all our difficulties have been traceable to an unaltering service to the principles of 'sound finance' which all our neighbours have neglected. . . . Wasn't it Lord Melbourne who said that 'No statesman ever does anything really foolish except on principle'?
When, in 1930, he switched from his earlier free trade position and became a promoter of protective tariffs against foreign imports, he thereby adopted the ancient, erroneous, and long-refuted policies of mercantilism. These were the trade policies founded on the principle of "beggar thy neighbor." But Keynes had long since decided to do a lot worse than just beggar his neighbor.
Conclusion
Ideas have consequences. Sexual preferences influence people's ideas. Lehrman's observation concerning Keynes' lack of children and his short-run economic outlook is on target. Keynes' economic system can honestly be described as the economics of perversion.
Christians have been naive. They think they can send their sons and daughters to colleges that call themselves Christian, but whose faculty members are loyal Keynesians (to the extent that they understand anything about economics). Parents pay no attention to what is taught in the classroom, just so long as the college requires 30 minutes of daily (or even weekly) chapel. Parents pay heavily for paying no attention.
Since the end of World War II, Christians have been financing their children's intellectual destruction by failing to inoculate them intellectually against secular humanism in general and Keynesian economics in particular. They have allowed the time perspective of a homosexual pervert to shape the economic outlook of their children. It is time for Christians to wake up. Just because some college puts the word "Christian" or "Baptist" or "Presbyterian" on its catalogue is no reason to entrust a child to its faculty. First, ask this question: Is Keynesian economics in any form taught on that campus? If so, save the tuition money. And if you don't know what Keynesian economics is, find out before you send your children back to that school.
**Any footnotes in original have been omitted here. They can be found in the PDF link at the bottom of this page.
Christian Reconstruction Vol. 10, No. 6 (November/December 1986)
For a PDF of the original publication, click here:
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