While we're doing _ad hominem_ , did van Mises grow up poor or something ?
"The third element was his deep hatred and contempt for the values and virtues of the bourgeoisie, for conventional morality, for savings and thrift, and for the basic institutions of family life."
^^^^ CB: Since they're doing _ad hominem_, I wonder if they mean to imply that Keynes' "contempt... for savings and thrift" had anything to do with his ideas on deficit spending.
The use of "bourgeoisie' is interesting. Keynes is in Britain's "ruling elite", but had contempt for the bourgeoisie. Uhhhuh The van Misesians ( or the author they quote approvingly) are pretending like the bougeoisie are not the ruling elite in Britain in 1900 ? They seem to mean the sort of mythical, idyllic bourgeoisie, thrifty types, that Marx describes:
"This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone-by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in the defence of property. M. Thiers, e.g., had the assurance to repeat it with all the solemnity of a statesman to the French people, once so spirituel. But as soon as the question of property crops up, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the intellectual food of the infant as the one thing fit for all ages and for all stages of development. In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. In the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and “labour” were from all time the sole means of enrichment, the present year of course always excepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm