Two Sides of the Same Debased Coin - Hunter Lewis - Mises Daily

Rather than follow Keynes and his followers down all these rabbit holes, let’s ask ourselves: is there a common theme to this nonsense? And there is a common theme. The common theme is that market prices don’t matter. In a system replete with paradoxes, this is the ultimate paradox: “In order to fix the price and profit system, we must subvert it. No free price or profit relationship must be left alone. The price/profit system must be poked, pushed, pulled apart, only to be left in a complete shambles.” The assault on interest rates and currency rates is particularly destructive, but all of this madcap tinkering with prices is destructive.

Is this, then, the essence of Keynesianism, its blind destruction of the price mechanism on which any economy depends, as Mises demonstrated? Yes. But there may be an even deeper essence.

When we think of Keynes’s headline ideas, they have a kind of formulaic quality. You take a long established observation, for example, that over-spending and debt are the road to bankruptcy and ruin, and turn it on its head. No, spending and debt are the road to wealth.

For the Victorians, spending within your means and avoiding debt were not just financial principles. They were moral principles. Keynes, who was consciously rebelling against these same Victorians, described their “copybook morality” as “medieval [and] barbarous.” He told his own inner circle that “I remain, and always will remain an immoralist.”

We are killing ourselves, doing it not only willingly but with verve. I see this and the comment by Keynes that he is an immoralist and this is what I see in my nation, a nation that has lost its moral compass. The governments destruction of information through the elimination of the price mechanism is an attempt to try to fool people to do what they would not have done. It is not just immoral and self destructive but criminal. We will all pay for this. Some with our lives.


Two Sides of the Same Debased Coin - Hunter Lewis - Mises Daily