How prescient was this?
The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods. In short we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.
The author?
J M Keynes.
It was published in National self-sufficiency (1933) Section 3, republished in Collected Writings Vol. 11 (1982).
And is still as relevant today.
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Is there anything better than “normal capitalism”?
Georgists believe that it is possible to achieve the effectiveness of laissez-faire capitalism together with the safety-net of state socialism and thus be an improvement on both of them. They would suggest that this can be done by two measures: the first being the replacement of our present complex avoidable array of taxes with one 100% tax on land rents to ensure that tax evasion becomes near-impossible rather than just illegal; the second being the replacement of our current morass of social security and minimum wage legislation with a nice big universal Basic Income for all citizens so that even those who cannot work can live a decent life.
The result would still be capitalism (or at least free enterprise) but it certainly sounds like an improvement on “normal capitalism” to me.
“But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.”
That last sentence is perhaps the most important.
What Keynes wrote in 1933 could best be summed up, with apologies to Winston Churchill, as “capitalism is the worst form of economic system, except for all the others have been tried”.
Keynes supported capitalism. Most of his work was designed to save it.
You’re right, but only in part
He sure as heck did not ask for the version we have now
Which I think his quote accurately described – the 1910s being the closest to global capital we’d seen by 1933 and to which he was referring, and to which he’d refer again now
What we put in its place is a Green Sustainable Economics proposed by the Green Economics Institute. And Economic Prosperity without Growth proposed by Tim Jackson.
Is this really prescience on Keynes’ part — or does it serve more as a retrospective indictment of those so-called ‘economists’ who have worked so hard and caused so much misery in order to unlearn the lessons of 1914-39? At the core of all his work Keynes was engaged not so much against a particular system of capitalism, as against the vicious cycle of amoral greed that captures ANY deregulated system sooner or later. It’s still as relevant today because the nature of the problem hasn’t changed, only the scale.
Hear, hear! It’s one thing to come up with the “perfect” economic system but it’s another far more difficult thing to ensure that it does not become corrupted by the efforts of “special interests” over time. Even if the system is heavily regulated the forces of greed may still target the regulation system itself and corrupt that.
As we can see when we look at what’s left of the US regulatory systems. The systems that were put in place there during the 1930s were in principle quite effective but they were still destroyed or emasculated in less than 60 years.
This is probably the major problem.