5/25/12, "Guest Post: Keynesianism & Eugenics," Zero Hedge, by John Aziz of Azizonomics
"Keynes was not just an economist. Between 1937 and 1944 he served as the head of the Eugenics Society and once called eugenics ”the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists.” And Keynes, we should add, understood that economics was a branch of sociology. So let’s be clear: Keynes thought eugenics was more important, more significant, and more genuine than economics....
Keynes’ interest in this topic appears to have descended from his contempt for the individual, and individual liberty. He once wrote:
Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these.
The common denominator in all of these examples — and in my view, the thing that brought Keynes toward eugenics — is the belief that the common individual is too stupid to be the captain of his own destiny. Instead, the state — supposedly equipped with the best minds and the best data — should centrally plan. Eugenicists believe that the state should centrally plan human reproduction, while Keynesians believe that the state should centrally engineer recovery from economic malaise through elevated spending. Although it would be unwise to accuse modern Keynesians of having sympathy for eugenics, the factor linking both of these camps together is John Maynard Keynes himself.
Keynes’ description of an economic depression — that a depression is a fall in the total economic output — is technically correct....The trouble seems to begin with prescriptions. Keynesianism dictates that the answer to an economic depression is an increase in state spending. And on the surface of it, an increase in state spending will lift the numbers. But will momentarily lifting the numbers genuinely help the economy? Not necessarily; the state could spend millions of dollars on subsidies for things that nobody wants, wasting time, effort, labour and taxes and thus destroying wealth. And the state can push a market into euphoria — just as Alan Greenspan did to the housing market — creating the next bubble and the next bust, requiring an even bigger bailout. State spending creates additional dependency on the state, and perverts the empirical market mechanism — the genuine underlying state of demand in a market economy — which signals to producers what to produce and not produce. Worst of all, centralist policies almost always have knock-on
- side-effects that no planner could foresee (causality is complicated)....
As Keynes seems to admit when — in the German language edition of his General Theory — he noted that the conditions of a totalitarian state may be more amenable to his economic theory, the desire for control may be the real story here.
Keynesianism brings more of the economy under the control of the state. It is a slow and creeping descent into dependency on the state. As we are seeing in Europe today, cuts in state spending in a state-dependent economy can cause deep economic contraction, providing the Keynesian more confirmation for his idea that the state should tax more, and spend more.
That is, until nature intervenes. Just as a state-controlled eugenics program might well spawn an inbred elite suffering hereditary illnesses as a result of a lack of genetic diversity (as seems to have happened with the inbred elite Darwin-Galton-Wedgwood clan), so a state-controlled economy may well grind itself into the dirt as it runs out of innovation as a result of a lack of economic diversity. Such a situation is unsustainable —
- no planner is smarter than nature."
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'The Obama Coalition' as described, ie, no middle class, sounds good to the author (as it does to those I know on the left). It's been long sought:
4/1/2010, "The Obama Coalition," The Atlantic, Thomas Byrne Edsall
"Over the last two years, there has been a massive increase in the number of people who have no place to turn except to the government. Enactment of the Obama administration’s health care reform legislation demonstrates the growing power of this burgeoning constituency—a constituency which will reap a disproportionate share of the $1 trillion in new health care spending over the next decade....
While both the “have” and “have-not” coalitions have been growing, with the middle waning, the devastating effects of the Great Recession, the inexorable enlargement of the minority electorate, and the legions of single voters now give greater momentum to the left and to the Democratic Party....
There are many ways to measure the expanding multitudes of those in need. From February 2008 to February 2010, the number of unemployed men and women doubled from 7.4 million to 14.9 million....
Altogether, this makes a total of 30 million Americans out of work or under-employed.
The numbers are bad enough, but there is a growing consensus among economists that the unemployment problem is likely to become structural—no longer a temporary phenomenon.
One of the most striking indicators of the potentially enduring unemployment status of many of those now out of work is the increase in the number of people who have been without jobs for six months or more. These people have the hardest time making it back into the workforce, and the growth of this population suggests that more and more people who lose a job face the danger that unemployment will become permanent....
Health care reform marks a significant milestone in the restoration of the American progressive tradition. Nonetheless Obama and the Democratic Party have their work cut out for them. Gallup, for example, reported a steady movement to the right in the electorate from 2008 to 2009: the belief that government regulation of business is excessive grew from 38 percent in September 2008 to 45 percent in September 2009.... The share of the population convinced that the global warming problem is “exaggerated” rose from 35 in March 2008 to 41 percent in March 2009....
The 2008 election demonstrated that the country is moving into a period of
- post-racial politics....
Obama has taken major risks. He could go down in flames...or he could effect—
- as promised—
- the long-awaited
- transformation of American politics."
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