Keynes wasn't wrong about economics. Keynes didn't have a theory of power, and he didn't know that a Soviet spy* with the full support of US oligarchs was going

Keynes wasn't wrong about economics. Keynes didn't have a theory of power, and he didn't know that a Soviet spy* with the full support of US oligarchs was going to sink the Bancor. He thought his vision would prevail just because it was right. Nobody cared what was right, these were people carving up the world and taking whatever they could leverage their power to grab. They weren't interested in his morality, they were interested in his tools. Rather than simply "class conflict," it's a theory of power in general that he was lacking, other than the abstract spending power of currency. He didn't understand that people who had everything that they could possibly buy would still be unhappy (even be driven by unhappiness) because others weren't suffering sufficiently. Or as Veblen explained, that people would be upset at the existence of less virtuous people who had as much as themselves, or alternatively upset that their lack of comfort advertised a lack of virtue. Or even: > “Keynes also underestimated the competitive drive that fuels the relentless quest for wealth and social status. The wealthy, in particular, are often motivated by a desire to maintain their relative standing, leading to an endless competition for supremacy.” Bill Mitchell also seems not to have a theory of power that I can recognize. Or he's simply lost all hope; I don't know that declaring that production and ownership should volunteer to shift itself is more reasonable than thinking that power could be morally and logically argued into relinquishing itself. Of course, the dope he's quoting thinks that power already has volunteered to give itself away, but of course the New Yorker would say that. In the Stalin-Wells talk, Keynes directly confronts soft socialism to hard Bolshevism in Shaw, Stalin and Wells with infinite confidence in his knowledge of how economics should work, but carries that cockiness into a unearned belief that he understood the psychology of the captains of industry and government. His pages are an interesting window, and it tells you all you need to know about capitalism that it is nearly impossible to google, nobody is distributing it, and it may be against the law to share this 1934 pamphlet.** ----- [*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Dexter_White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Dexter_White [**] downloadable at: https://theverbatimrecord.wordpress.com/ https://theverbatimrecord.wordpress.com/