A collection of quacks and shrewd self-promoters sold millions of Americans on exotic theories of financial ease. Instead of a promised land of sustained prosperity, we’re left with an enormous mess to clean up (at best) and probably a full economic meltdown on the horizon. For starters, we might want to try looking for better advice.

If the stars align just right, each generation may witness one or two radiant figures who achieve such dazzling advances for totalitarian authority that our ruling elites can speak no ill of their personal and public failings, no matter how dramatic. Abe Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Michael “Martin Luther” King serve as worthy members of that ignoble pantheon, if we can look past so much Hollywood, state media and public school adulation. (Some may question the inclusion of MLK on this short list of super-villains. But providing rhetorical ammunition for three generations of arbitrary racial revenge, hounding millions of European Americans from their U.S. urban homelands, chasing manufacturing jobs out of city environments with nationalized union fascism, spawning the scourge of black welfare dependency, neutralizing non-governmental black progress of the 1940s and 50s, and riling up his followers so greatly they would riot in over 110 cities the week after his death—while helping to seed a staggering 750 race riots from 1964 to 1971—settles it for me.)

The Right Honorable Lord John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) is another such example.

The distinguished British salesman of international “free lunch” economics was a master of pandering to politicians’ short-term desires for instant gratification at someone else’s expense. His eloquence in advocating fallacious but soothing positions empowered ruling establishments and their corporate facilitators for decades. For that, he is celebrated by many, despised by a few, yet emulated by nearly everyone in the halls of high finance.

The section headings for this essay are as follows:

• The Economic Crisis at Hand: Who Taught Us to be this Dumb?


• ‘Free Lunch’ Fantasies: 1930s – the Decade of Economic Insanity


• Keynesian Influence on the New Deal


• Maynard ‘Feasting with Panthers’: The Making of a Megalomaniac


• Keynesian Alchemy Finds a Home at Subsidized Colleges


• The ‘Stimulus’ Ruse: Putting a Positive Spin on Wealth Destruction


• Academic Effrontery Becomes the New Normal


• Recap on Banking Basics


• The Original Fraud of Modern Banking


• The Fickle, Futile and Fanatical Opposition


• I Hate the Same People You Hate: Please Buy My Newsletter!


• Left-wing Economic Crack Up


• Conclusion

If the flawed ideas of J.M. Keynes had rested merely with his colleagues at school or perhaps some avid book readers, the world might have been spared some of the economic calamity from the Depression era that still haunts us today. But in America, its four-term President and his stable of academic wizards—known affectionately as the Brain Trust—latched on to Keynesian “stimulus” folly and other aromatic but implausible notions. Immediately after World War II, and largely to this day, college economics departments cling to his theories as well. Political and institutional supporters of Keynesian principles now control nearly all positions of power in the West, which helps explain the dire financial conditions we now face.

While Franklin D. Roosevelt was instrumental as the front man for many fantastically failed political programs, his personality and background have already been thoroughly analyzed by others. This essay will offer a recap of New Deal economic highlights, but it will not further evaluate FDR, the Man, other than this brief synopsis: he was a shallow, eager-to-please aristocrat with remarkable acting abilities and a gigantic ego, hopelessly in over his head. Accordingly, no one teaches or believes in “Rooseveltism.” (Spell check doesn’t even recognize it as a word.)

On the other hand, most Wall Street, media and college economics experts treat Keynesianism as a serious governing philosophy, even if some may disagree with elements of his positions. As such, Mr. Keynes will receive more attention in this essay.

How was, and is, John Maynard Keynes influential? For starters, the student and lecturer from Cambridge University who went on to various governmental advisory positions led the charge from the 1920s to mid-40s against the political constraints of the gold standard and gave rhetorical cover for cheap and easy credit to fund rampant social spending that made him the darling of FDR, his disastrous New Deal and subsequent deficit chicanery.

Other notable accomplishments of the dashing economist include a clueless oblivion to harmful fiat inflation while promoting the concept of public servitude under the ruse of “full employment.” The professed expert on everything—who held a semi-valid job for a scant two years—also promoted a farcical “paradox of thrift” which further encouraged wasteful government spending while attacking the virtues of individual saving and investing. Those enduring legacies of raw political quackery enabled the debt and inflation explosions we suffer from today.

Keynes’s appeal rested on a mix of talents common to any successful court suitor. The Dr. Feelgood of economic theory used a mix of charm, refined British manners and fanciful jargon on “liquidity preference”, “aggregate demand” and other pretentious tripe to compel fellow intellectuals and witless politicians to gullibly buy his tarnished wares.

Regarding his relentless assault against individual “thrift”—made futile now by ongoing inflationary debasement—the hedonist Keynes loved public adoration and hated anything that required patience and self-control. Accordingly, he championed an ideology that merely reflected his own personal preferences at the expense of everyone else. And the imperial command in Washington D.C. has been infatuated with Keynesian promises ever since.

Meanwhile, flustered conservative critics have failed since the 1930s to make any traction against Keynes’s flawed prescriptions in particular and to counter runaway debt in general. Instead, this hapless gang of right-wing and libertarian book-thumpers and pamphleteers have settled for turning Keynesian into a meaningless epithet interspersed with chants of “end the Fed” or some unintelligible noises about “globalism.” Hardly a valid alternative for anyone to rally around.

The Economic Crisis at Hand: Who Taught Us to be this Dumb?

Which brings us to some important preliminary considerations. Many economic commentators have drawn attention to the growing wealth disparity between rich and poor in America. The fact that the top 0.1% of Americans now own more wealth than the bottom 80% (here’s a nice graphic on that from C.H. Smith and the Washington Post) is disturbing in itself, even if most critics of that destabilizing wealth gap offer no sensible advice on what to do about it.

Others focus on the massive $1.6 trillion of student debt or the gargantuan $26 trillion of national debt. Still others point to the real annual inflation rate of 8-10% over the last two decades (based on traditional accounting measures tracked by ShadowStats) of which our government claims is only about 1-2%.

I would agree that all of those issues are legitimate concerns. And I also think that most mainstream (and some internet) attention given to those problems amounts to convenient excuses to breed discontent and impose more socialist government programs—or in the case of libertarians, to bash the Federal Reserve and exonerate their beloved private-sector Debt Dealers.

In a more general sense, I think we should be asking: How did all this happen? How did a supposedly “educated” populace of functioning adults allow such malfunction to occur without any effective opposition (or arguably, any semblance of a counter-strategy)?

When faced with such staggering long-term incompetence, my first thought is to ask: Who is teaching us history, economics and other political matters? The answer to that should be obvious, but doesn’t get much objective attention in mainstream media. Unfortunately, education in America—the leading source of ostensible “experts” on practically everything—has largely been corrupted by government subsidies (nearly $1.3 trillion as of FY 2020) and is now run predominantly by control freaks, charlatans and sycophants who (in addition to their smorgasbord of PC pig vomit) think monologue books and lectures are the only way of learning (as opposed to a more balanced mix of mentoring and apprenticeships that worked for centuries without subsidies, hair-trigger censorship or student rioting).

This scholastic cult of empire worship naturally concludes that central planning is the answer to every problem in society. And they teach that skewed opinion as a fact to be memorized and recited like some quasi-religious catechism that feigns to be “science.” This is actually nothing new. The crude method of monologue indoctrination—as opposed to a more mentally sharpening dialogue approach or dynamic learning experience under a competent “master” in some chosen profession—has always been central to the university model.

In higher education, less than 10 of the 4,300 colleges in the U.S. (as of 2017) decline federal subsidies along with their anti-social and legalistic strings attached. The college and university system in America—a $671 billion industry as of the Fall 2017 to Spring 2018 school year—is dominated with over 98% of revenue going to tax-favored governmental and “non-profit” schools, removing any pretense of independence.

What we have left is an atmosphere of pampered elites jostling for attention and knee-jerk conformists trying to appease the increasingly angry mobs. Even back in 1944, economist F.A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom warned of the easy step “From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic” being common to the ideology of central planning. Two years later, economist Henry Hazlitt, in his popular book Economics in One Lesson, criticized the academic tendency of “exhibitionistic straining for novelty and originality.” Since then, college theatrics have gotten immeasurably worse. At that time, neither man (both lifetime thinkers and writers) seemed willing to concede that the very nature of college prepares people to be single-minded extremists and unbalanced fanatics, with an official “degree” at the end of the process to falsely signal one’s theoretical achievement in some narrow field of interest.

Among other things, college in America is not driven by consumer needs or market efficiency. This “consumer-be-damned” attitude reveals itself with the Publish or Perish mentality where the English-language academic world now cranks out over 28,000 “scholarly peer-reviewed journals,” which scarcely few people bother to read. Little, if any, of that cryptic research improves student learning. But it does boost the school’s prestige and help secure more corporate and federal R&D grants, which now combine to over $60 billion annually just in the U.S. (Chasing after grants doesn’t offer much benefit to teaching either.)

As a result of the excessive reliance on monologue books and lectures, the institutional setting of a passive audience held captive by oppressive “degree” requirements, the dependence on outside political subsidies and constant groveling for attention, the conflict of interest to speak kindly of government programs—no matter how much obvious failure exists—permeates everything that oozes out of that decrepit environment. Shabby economic teaching is just one such deficiency.

‘Free Lunch’ Fantasies: 1930s – the Decade of Economic Insanity

When it comes to slovenly economic instruction, few topics bring out the malignant nature of subsidized academia like New Deal apologetics. It’s hard to imagine a more consistent record of failure that has received almost nothing but breathless adoration from people who should know better.

For this section, I’ll look primarily to the condensed record of what Keynesian and New Deal “stimulus” policies gave us—most of which has been whitewashed by fawning federal broadcasters and the rest of Hollywood story telling. Thanks again to educational incompetence, many in America are calling for a repeat of those disastrous measures with a ruinous Green New Deal.

After the stock market correction of 1929 (when very few Americans owned stock) President Hoover took radical measures to increase taxes and spending and to convince companies to keep wages high—although this made business survival more difficult and rendered new hiring nearly impossible. (Less than a decade prior, political leaders in Washington allowed the severe 1920-21 depression to naturally work itself out, with no “stimulus” spending shenanigans.)

While running for his first term in the 1932 election, Franklin Roosevelt openly ridiculed Hoover for his reckless spending, crying “Stop the deficits! Stop the deficits!” at campaign rallies, as recounted in John Flynn’s book The Roosevelt Myth. During that same bait-and-switch presidential race, FDR attacked Hoover’s spending as “the most reckless and extravagant past that I have been able to discover in the statistical record of any peacetime government anywhere, any time,” as quoted in Robert Murphy’s Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal, page 55.

When President Roosevelt took the reins of power in March 1933, his campaign lip-service to fiscal restraint would vanish before Washington D.C.’s famous cherry blossoms could fall to the ground.

Owing to his aristocratic upbringing and weak constitution, FDR chose to surround himself with a cast of little men with Big Ideas and a dangerously inflated view of their own abilities. These academic nudniks concocted one ridiculous scheme after another, all failing miserably, and all extending what should have been a brief market correction and liquidation of empty banks (guilty of rampant counterfeiting, protected by local laws against branch banking) into an extended state of misery. Thanks largely to the power of fiat credit—along with masterful stage management and forcibly silencing the opposition—New Deal accomplishments included:

1) thirteen consecutive years of usually massive deficit spending with outlays averaging 60% over revenues even before the FY 1942 war spike (a big win for bankers who financed that debt) whereas the entire decade of the 1920s had seen consistent budget surpluses

2) abandoning the domestic gold standard a mere 1 month and 1 day into office, on April 5, 1933, despite campaign promises to the contrary (triggering instability in business planning while opening the hydrants for more fiat spending)

3) paying farmers to throw away mountains of good food and cotton via the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (struck down by the Supreme Court in 1936); a pro-farming website recounts the AAA as follows:

in the late spring of 1933, the federal government carried out “emergency livestock reductions.” In Nebraska, the government bought about 470,000 cattle and 438,000 pigs. Nationwide, six million hogs were purchased from desperate farmers. In the South, one million farmers were paid to plow under 10.4 million acres of cotton.

The hogs and cattle were simply killed. In Nebraska, thousands were shot and buried in deep pits.

Intentional waste and inflated food prices became a New Deal virtue. Keynes openly praised the AAA writing an open letter to FDR in December 1933 saying “I should strongly support in principle… [your] various schemes for agricultural restriction.”

4) pushing millions of people into long-term debt and houses they couldn’t afford with his 1934 National Housing Act (another big win for bankers)

5) concocting the overtly fascist NRA industrial cartels (unanimously struck down by the Supreme Court in 1935) that crushed small businesses and elevated labor strife

6) enticing old people to quit working entirely (thereby juicing employment stats, which treat unemployed elderly as “non-persons,” while politically dividing young and old people)

7) encouraging millions of middle-age people to join Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration patronage “jobs” programs (further manipulating employment stats while hurting employers by tightening the labor pool)

Year	U.S. Unemployment Rates (%)		Percent on CCC or WPA “relief” jobs
	Based on private-sector jobs	Including gov’t “relief” jobs as work
1929	3.2	3.2	0.0
1932	23.6	22.9	0.7
1933	24.9	20.6	4.3
1934	21.7	16.0	5.7
1935	20.1	14.2	5.9
1936	16.9	9.9	7.0
1937	14.3	9.1	5.2
1938	19.0	12.5	6.5
1939	17.2	11.3	5.9
1940	14.6	9.5	5.1

Source: Economists S. Lebergott and M. Darby, summarized by Wikipedia.
About 25 million Americans participated in one of the New Deal federal jobs programs steered towards loyal Democrats, according to contemporary research compiled by historian John Flynn (The Roosevelt Myth, pages 122-127).

8) encouraging widespread union trespassing and violence with his 1935 NLRA that crippled thousands of businesses and radicalized the formerly reasonable union movement; this period is still celebrated by the mainstream media, commies in this detailed analysis and Socialist Worker.org who praise the unionized “class struggle” as depicted below:

Long before cops appeased BLM and antifa militants, government law-enforcement turned a blind eye to pervasive union violence and trespassing. Provoked by earlier abuses from FDR’s National Recovery Act of 1933 (that created industrial cartels) and widespread mistreatment from monopolistic railroad, steel and other industries before that, organized labor went wild in the mid-1930s. Thanks to New Deal union interference, “the number of ‘strike days’ doubled in one year, from 14 million in 1936 to 28 million in 1937.” Backed by the new powers of the federal government to stifle management resistance, union membership soared “from 13 percent of the work force in 1935 to 29 percent in 1939.” Needless to say, the heavy-handed union thuggery (including blockades, damaging plant equipment and mass squatting) all hurt American economic conditions. (stats from Robert Murphy’s P.I. Guide, page 108)

9) transferring power from elected officials to swarms of unelected bureaucrats that write, enforce and judge their own rules (now millions of them) with virtually no checks or balances—nothing less than the illegitimate birth of our menacing Deep State

10) creating wage controls during World War II that became the basis of our coercive corporate “benefits” explosion in subsequent decades; skyrocketing medical costs would soon follow

A truly breathtaking record of incompetence, by any objective measure. But academic Quislings are not paid to be objective.

Instead, the sharpest minds from Roosevelt’s Brain Trust—mainly lawyers from Columbia and Harvard Universities—crafted speeches and legal arguments to sell their programs to the public and to skeptical judges (who would soon be bullied into submission). FDR’s penchant for praising himself and his unprecedented battalions of hundreds of employees in media relations fed loyal news agencies press releases touting wondrous benefits of “relief” and “assistance” and “progress” and “security” and other manipulative slogans that federal broadcasters have dutifully repeated to this day.

The glitch that the federal government has no legal authority to interfere in any of items #3 through 10—the Constitution says nothing about farming, housing, labor relations, retirement, etc.—never mattered to those in Washington who loved (and still lust) to forcibly impose their opinions on others. To defend their lawless crusade, New Dealers and their modern supporters reduce the entire Constitution down to trite bumper stickers of “general welfare”, “interstate commerce” and a few other simplistic concepts. Their frenetic zeal for social “uplift” could never be restrained by mere legal wording from the distant past.

In many regards, these were religious fanatics out to “save” the nation—not by any personal sacrifice of their own, but by the “shared sacrifices” of others. And with heavy public tribute.

Throughout the Great Depression, following Keynesian stimulus principles, “Roosevelt was able to raise the average income tax from 1.35% to 16.56% during his tenure—an increase of 1,100%” according to economics writer Doug Casey. All of this failed to “stimulate” the economy and just planted seeds of division that crass politicians would harvest at the polls every couple of years since then. Yet, remarkably, federal broadcasters and government educators still mischaracterize fiat spending as “stimulus” as if the latter was an established fact.

Then more inflationary spending on tanks, bombs and battleships—financed by fiat lending and massive tax increases—brought us ever greater Soviet-style austerity conditions during World War II. Shoddy economic historiography has consistently minimized the fact that during FDR’s and Churchill’s bloodbath in Europe and Japan, private-sector upheaval was masked because nearly everyone was now working directly or indirectly for Uncle Sam.

The U.S. economy only recovered after its ridiculous leader ceased his rule in 1945, wasteful government spending subsided and the economy was spared additional New Deal abuses that had created so much instability.

In total, the 10 major “stimulus” acts outlined above (and many more like them) were the undertakings of inept Washington officials who obsessed over their own personal image at the expense of the public—with most programs harming the country to this day. This was an early version of “virtue signaling” which is usually associated with “psychopathic, manipulative, and narcissistic people” who excel in traits like “self-promotion, emotional callousness, duplicity, and tendency to take advantage of others.”

Naturally, government enthusiasts celebrate FDR and his reckless New Deal and deceitful dragging of America into World War II without a hint of apprehension. PBS’s slick 7-part docudrama “The Roosevelts – An Intimate History” (carried recently on Netflix for over a year) leads off with a court historian offering the gushing assessment: “These two Roosevelts were exceptional with a capital ‘E’, underscore.” Other federal broadcasters offer only glib platitudes on FDR’s efforts for “saving” the nation and providing “relief” and “aid” for the common man. The jingoistic propaganda is reduced to that level of childish banter.

Keynesian Influence on the New Deal

To what extent J.M. Keynes figured into all that “stimulus” folly is perhaps open to debate, but by all accounts I can find, his influence was significant. Admirers of both FDR and Keynes openly share the credit between those two “giants” of Big Government. For instance, Business Insider says “Keynes’ approach, and one that FDR bought into, was that somebody had to step in and start buying stuff.” An Econ 488 outline effuses that “Roosevelt’s execution of Keynesian economic policy through the New Deal brought the United States out of one of its darkest eras.”

The FDR library makes no qualms about linking New Deal programs to the famed British economist:

At the end of FDR’s first year in office, in December 1933, Keynes was comfortable enough with Roosevelt that the economist wrote an open letter to the president (published in the New York Times) opining that:

You have made yourself the Trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system.

… I do not mean to impugn the social justice and social expediency of the redistribution of incomes aimed at by N.I.R.A. and by the various schemes for agricultural restriction. The latter, in particular, I should strongly support in principle. But too much emphasis on the remedial value of a higher price-level as an object in itself may lead to serious misapprehension as to the part which prices can play in the technique of recovery. The stimulation of output by increasing aggregate purchasing power is the right way to get prices up; and not the other way round.

… I put in the second place the maintenance of cheap and abundant credit and in particular the reduction of the long-term rates of interest.

The world-renowned economist ended his letter:

With great respect,

Your obedient servant
J M Keynes

This is a good representation of the “exhibitionistic” pseudo-intellectual “straining”—and political appeasement—that made Keynes a darling to the economic royalty of London, the budding Deep State in Washington and the academic elites in the New Deal administration.

Maynard ‘Feasting with Panthers’: The Making of a Megalomaniac

Keynes had already begun his journey to distinction decades before Franklin Roosevelt won the White House. From an early age, J.M. Keynes, known as Maynard to his friends and colleagues, was a prolific thinker and writer with high aspirations. As such, he earned a living like any academic celebrity with a flexible moral compass: by relying on corporate and political sponsors for most of his adult life. And his lofty ideas, not so much new as opposed to newly packaged, paid huge dividends to his public investors.

In 1908, at age 25, he was appointed as an economics lecturer at King’s College in Cambridge, England, where he had begun undergraduate math studies in 1902. For years there, Keynes polished his rhetorical skills in public debating, practicing the art of pretending to passionately support or oppose any given topic, a talent that trial lawyers and politicians find indispensable. As the son of a Cambridge University administrator, back when such status meant considerable privilege, the intellectually sharp Keynes disdained anything that resembled honest work. Personally implementing any of his opinions via offering services to willing customers never interested him at all.

Keynes’s early adult personality was molded through his membership in two proudly anti-social cliques: the secret society of the Cambridge Apostles and the London avant-garde club known as the Bloomsbury Group. Murray Rothbard’s 1992 biography Keynes, the Man deals extensively and critically with both groups; the prior sentence provides links to Wikipedia’s also unfavorable take on each. Artist and literary critic Wyndham Lewis’s 1930 satire The Apes of God called Bloomsbury “elitist, corrupt and talentless” according to Wikipedia. In both groups, it can reasonably be concluded that Keynes fostered his disgust for Victorian values while developing a conceit for his own manicured opinions.

From late-1906 to June 1908, Keynes worked for less than two years remotely planning Indian finances as a bureaucrat in London, his closest lifetime encounter with anything resembling a real job. During this time, the Cambridge intellectual showed no concern for British imperial abuses to the populous subcontinent, according to Rothbard. After that short stint in the civil service workforce, Keynes returned to teaching at Cambridge then moved on to further government employment for the British Treasury in 1915. During the 1920s, Keynes sold his enlightened opinions to corporate advertisers and loyal readers of the left-wing Manchester Guardian newspaper and the American socialist magazine The Nation.

By 1930, Keynes—an archetypical expert with no experience—had already authored A Treatise on Money as well as earlier books The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill (a screed against the gold standard in 1925) and The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). The latter book correctly argued against “punitive reparations payments imposed on Germany by the Allied countries after World War I,” as one economic admirer put it. This touch of youthful boldness and bracingly frank yet reasonable analysis would fade away when Keynes later took center stage among economic monarchs.

Then in 1936, with most Western capitals desperate to latch onto any scheme that put a scholarly spin on deficit spending, the opportunistic Keynes authored his rambling The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money to quench their thirst. Politicians and government economists gobbled it whole.

The content and style of this legendary book is mostly disorganized and bland. But it is interspersed with academic banter like Keynes’s professed “emancipation from preconceived ideas,” his “struggle of escape from habitual modes of thought and expression” and his “divergence from received doctrine.” Keynes’s target audience was explicitly “my fellow economists” who reveled in such sophistry.

After wearing out the reader with over 60 pages of such pedantic but occasionally florid prose, the British aristocrat landed his first of many sucker punches against thrift—a veritable Academic Rope-A-Dope as so many book-thumping welterweights are prone to do. Keynes absolutely hated the middle-class values of the West that didn’t sufficiently appreciate a Man of Leisure and Letters (and adventurous bisexual) like himself. First, I’ll address the most likely reason why he despised conservative values. Then, I’ll make a go at how this attitude played out in his public mission.

In any serious discussion of J.M. Keynes, one cannot overlook the two great passions that animated his life: political exhibitionism in service of the state and having sex with random men, boys and the occasional child slave. On the latter predilection that Keynes once described as “feasting with panthers,” we don’t need to rely on tawdry gossip from foggy memories of partisan combatants (e.g., the elaborate smear campaigns against Supreme Court nominees Clarence Thomas and Brett Cavanaugh) or the wild accusations of an attention-seeking porn whore named Stormy attacking President Trump, all to the media’s delight. In the case of Master Keynes, we have remarkably candid admissions in his own words from two surviving diaries.

The relevance connecting Keynes’s promiscuous sexual appetite (which may possibly have subsided when he married Russian ballerina, Lydia Lopokova, in 1925) and childless status to his public policy impositions would seem apparent and noncontroversial: Keynes favored instant gratification and paid little heed to long-term ramifications. Hence, his most famous quote, “in the long run we are all dead” and the rest of his short-term panaceas that left long-term damage. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s book Democracy, The God That Failed (p. 59) briefly touches on this theme, noting the continuum of “Keynes’s personal philosophy of hedonism and present-orientation” to his free-spending economics and chaotic anti-gold stance.

While sexual escapades usually make for sensational headlines (even among Kennedy and FDR admirers, long after their deaths) most mainstream accounts of Keynes conspicuously leave out his sordid lifestyle, any discussion of which might tarnish their economic hero. Two rare exceptions are a snarky liberal at The Atlantic poking fun in a 2008 blog post on “Keynes’s ‘Jew Boy’ Quickie” and the left-wing U.K. Independent newspaper in 2015 going into some detail on his conquests of “rent boys” and over 100 other recorded sexual encounters. The latter publication drew only positive conclusions that such random sexual behavior allowed Keynes to “meet people from less privileged backgrounds and less clever than he – which may have made him more liberal and tolerant.” The Independent’s salacious 2015 article on Keynes’s “shocking… sex life” was generously subtitled “his bedroom antics were as interesting as his theories.”

Wikipedia’s account of Mr. Keynes praises his economic theories and mentions none of his degenerate behavior, instead spinning a counter-offensive that “Political opponents have used Keynes’s sexuality to attack his academic work.”

The evidence that both left-wing admirers and many right-wing critics have dutifully gone along in covering up this bizarre and likely criminal conduct (not to mention savagely incompetent economic advice) shows the power of statist media and educational institutions in enforcing taboos defending their allies. Keynes, the self-described “immoralist,” was knighted by King George VI in 1942. After that, for the next two or three generations the high priests of government authority and academic effrontery offered nothing but rapturous praise for their counterfeit saint.

How Keynes manifested his personal worldview into involuntary public policy is of greater importance, even if it does seem less “interesting” to many in corporate media. Any reasonable person should certainly understand his desire to push back against the smothering conformity of early 20^th century English culture—in many aspects of life, not just sexuality. But Keynes fought back by attacking personal thrift and doing so in the crudest language displayed in his roughly 240-page General Theory. And these hostile attitudes were, at Keynes’s enthusiastic urging to any politician who would listen, forged into weapons that would harm hundreds of millions of people within his lifetime.

In Keynes’s 1936 manifesto, thrift is “obstinately orthodox” and “Obstinacy can bring only a penalty and no reward.” He warns of a “sudden outbreak of thrift in the working classes.” Then Keynes hides behind the approving quote from another contemporary economist who claimed widespread “belief in the utility of luxury and the evil of thrift.”

After highlighting government’s role in the “great art to make a nation happy” via centralized employment policy, Keynes takes a sarcastic swipe at any remaining doubters, writing:

No wonder that such wicked sentiments called down the opprobrium of two centuries of moralists