> Roubini sounds like Keynes: a capitalism cheerleader who
> concentrates on predicting disasters in order to warn the system
> managers.
Keynes wasn't a capitalist cheerleader. Like Marx, he saw capitalism as a means for solving what he called "the economic problem", for creating the productive forces required for a truly good community, "the ideal social republic of the future" as he called it.
Though they had this positive consequence (and were, therefore, "passions" in the sense of Hegel), the motives he took to be dominant in capitalism were inconsistent with those that would characterize such a community. The "essential characteristic" of capitalism, he claimed, was "the dependence upon an intense appeal to the money- making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine."
He treated the love of money and the preference for the future over the present as expressions of psychopathology understood psychoanalytically.
Thus he claimed "the love of money as a possession" was "a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease." He derived it from the repression and sublimation of "libido". The preference for the future over the present, for "jam tomorrow and never jam to-day", he ascribed to denial of death. "The 'purposive' man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time."
Also like Marx, he belongs to the tradition in ethics deriving from the Greeks, a tradition in which the ethical "good" is "love" elaborated as relations of mutual recognition.
Once the development of productive powers - the solving of "the economic problem" - made it practicable, we could turn to "the profound moral an social problems of how to organise material abundance to yield up the fruits of a good life."
“The real problems of the future are first the maintenance of peace, of international co-operation and amity, and beyond that the profound moral and social problems of how to organise material abundance to yield up the fruits of a good life. These are the heroic tasks of the future.” (Collected Writings, vol. XXVII, pp. 260-1)
We would then be free
“to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue - that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable to taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin." (vol. IX, pp. 330-1) <http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/368keynesgrandchildren.html>
"Morality" expressed as self-righteous moralistic condemnation is inconsistent with this ethical tradition. Keynes understood it as "sadistic puritanism", a super-ego morality having the same source in unmastered instincts as the capitalist money-motives themselves.
Ironically, it's also the source of the inability to see any positive conception of the ethical, such as the one that informs the political economy of Keynes and Marx, as anything other than a hiding place for a will to sadistic domination.
Ted