Keynes the Man.pdf - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

Murray N. Rothbard 51could still retain “a wide field for the exercise of private initiativeand responsibility.” As Hazlitt puts it,Investment is a key decision in the operation of any economicsystem. And government investment is a form of socialism.Only confusion of thought, or deliberate duplicity, would denythis. For socialism, as any dictionary would tell the Keynesians,means the ownership and control of the means of productionby government. Under the system proposed by Keynes, thegovernment would control all investment in the means of productionand would own the part it had itself directly invested.It is at best mere muddleheadedness, therefore, to present theKeynesian nostrums as a free enterprise or “individualistic”alternative to socialism. (Hazlitt [1959] 1973, p. 388; cf. Brunner1987, pp. 30, 38)There was a system that had become prominent and fashionablein Europe during the 1920s and 1930s that was preciselymarked by this desired Keynesian feature: private ownership, subjectto comprehensive government control and planning. This was,of course, fascism.Where did Keynes stand on overt fascism? From the scatteredinformation now available, it should come as no surprise thatKeynes was an enthusiastic advocate of the “enterprising spirit”of Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder and leader of British fascism,in calling for a comprehensive “national economic plan” in late1930. By 1933, Virginia Woolf was writing to a close friend thatshe feared Keynes was in the process of converting her to “a formof fascism.” In the same year, in calling for national self-sufficiencythrough state control, Keynes opined that “Mussolini, perhaps,is acquiring wisdom teeth” (Keynes 1930b, 1933, p. 766; Johnsonand Johnson 1978, p. 22; on the relationship between Keynes andMosley, see Skidelsky 1975, pp. 241, 305–6; Mosley 1968, pp. 178,207, 237–38, 253; Cross 1963, pp. 35–36).But the most convincing evidence of Keynes’s strong fascistbent was the special foreword he prepared for the German editionof The General Theory. This German translation, published in late