kids v. economists

[Carl Remick]

>Ted Winslow wrote:
>
>>The "oinker" aspect is connected to his acceptance of genetic determinism.
>
>Ted, you make a persuasive case that Keynes's utopia was something a
>Marxian socialist would find appealing - that "the republic of [his]
>imagination lies on the extreme left of celestial space." Yet to
>paraphrase Gore Vidal's remark about America, with Keynes there is
>always the "but...." His anti-Marxism, his praise of how his policies
>could unleash the full promise of "the Manchester  system" - these
>suggest that he didn't think the mud-dwelling proles were the active
>subjects in his imaginative republic - bad genes, and all. In a lot
>of ways, he sounds like a gentleman aesthete, hostile to capitalist
>values because they undermined the values and social power of the
>aristocracy. Something of a Fabian, I guess, who just didn't trust
>the masses to run things (and from his point of view it sometimes
>seemed like businesspeople were among the vulgar masses).
>
>Doug

I think this comment of Keynes' is key: "For at least a hundred years we 
must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is 
fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution 
must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of 
the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."

Yet another goddamned "light at the end of the tunnel."  Hey, hey, JMK!

Carl
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