New Book Reveals Economist John Maynard Keynes as Anti-Semite

by Micah J. Fleck

Big spending politicians love Keynesian Economics – and why not? It has the brilliant good fortune of both validating their non-frugal spending proclivity and appeasing the bleeding heart liberal crowd that seems to embody the common voter – but what they aren’t telling us is that this darling of economic thought, despite all its current support in the public sphere, is based on outdated, antisemitic political views.

John Maynard Keynes, the originator of the Keynesian School (that junk branch of economics that real economists perpetually debunk but politicians won’t let die), has been accused in a new book to have much of his driving economic principles based in nothing more than baseless bigotry, the Economic Policy Journal reports.

Acclaimed historian Richard Davenport-Hines‘ newest work, The Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes, offers the following insight:

“[H]is marriage to a Russian [Lydia Lopokova] in whom bigotry of the Tsarist regime had been ingrained since girlhood, perpetuated this blight on his character. Their banter together included automatic jibes about the Jews: he considered Judaism as a subject for harsh superior humor. ‘I smelt it’, he told Lopovoka in 1924 after hearing that the Gluckstein family, which owned Lyons Corner House, had bought the Cafe Royal where his Tuesday Club held its monthly dinners…

He still remained enough of an Edwardian to regard immigrants from eastern Europe as schemers, who outwitted less nimble-minded natives and polluted their environment: “It is not agreeable to see a civilisation so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and the brains’ he said of Weimar Germany.”

The Journal further expounds upon what motivations might be driving what seems to be intentional omission and/or willful ignorance regarding Keynes’ previously documented antisemitism on the part of the political left, suggesting that a desire to create an ideal narrative and/or distort the views of opposing political and economic views trumps a more objective approach to understanding what really founded the Keynesian school of economic thought.

If that’s right, then we are dealing with much more than simple innocent lack of understanding when it comes to the liberal press/politicians and economics; rather, we are dealing with malicious intent.

Let’s hope, for everyone’s sake, that it’s merely the former, and that people on the left who hold sway can still be reasoned with – all it will take, in that case, is a little bit of education regarding what really motivated the politics of the founder of what has unjustly become the most promoted economics philosophy in the country.

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