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Only ignorance of economics, or an intent to deceive, can account for anyone telling you that government interference with free trade is morally acceptable or beneficial.

If you’d like a perfect contemporary example of this truism, try reading a new “Fortune” article by Colin Lodewick and Nick Lichtenberg — even its headline screams economic ignorance or deceptiveness, gushing with admiration for two historical frauds and the idiocy they embraced.

One of the frauds merely was a British economic excuse-maker who hated free markets; the other was a mass murderer who hated free markets. But both of their utopian plans visited death and hardship on generations, and it’s a sign of just how much some writers and editors despise freedom that we see this, emblazoned at the header:

“A 100-year-old quote from a legendary economist explains why Americans are so angry about inflation. Lenin agreed”

You see Lenin’s name, but, for some reason, the authors didn’t mention the tens of thousands who soon died as a result of his bloodthirsty thuggery or his insane collectivist policies (also thuggery, since all the policies were backed by government force of arms). And you likely can guess the “legendary economist” – that being John Maynard Keynes, who isn’t so much legendary as he is infamous and a figure of shame, intellectual fraud, and political favoritism.

Evidently taking a page from the Biden Admin’s motif of pointing fingers at ridiculous bogeymen like “Putin” and “Climate” and “COVID19” as the culprits for skyrocketing prices in food, fuel, and everything else, rather than actually looking at the real causes (predicted long ago by yours truly and many others) – those being inflation of the centrally-controlled money supply, lockdowns, “regulations,” and wild government spending – the authors, get this, actually try to BLAME “CAPITALISM” for the “inflation.”

And they use Keynes’ praise of Bolsheviks like Lenin to support their sleight of hand.

First, their statement of fact, but a fact they seem to intentionally strip of context, as if, at first, they want people to see rising prices as a weather phenomenon.

“With the latest monthly Consumer Price Index released on Friday showing an 8.6% gain—the highest in 40 years—most product prices are unlikely to decline any time soon.”

That’s the set-up for their misdirection, as they offer the “answer” that, in fact, this is not just a chance occurrence, but is a result of the vicissitudes of…

UNFETTERED CAPITALISM…

“So what does that mean for consumers? Maybe the total unraveling of American capitalism, according to the much-studied English economist John Maynard Keynes.”

Ahh, yes.

And they dive right into the Keynesian/Marxian/Pro-Government-Control ocean to ride the waves.

The sleight-of-hand is very subtle, and allows us to reveal it in phases:

“’Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency,’ Keynes wrote. ‘By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.’
This ‘arbitrary rearrangement of riches,’ he continued, strikes at both the security and confidence that people have in the economic system. He went on to explain that inflation turns consumers against capitalists—'profiteers,’ in his words—when they see how those individuals accrue wealth while they suffer from inflation.”

Heck, it almost sounds as if both Lenin and Keynes could’ve been on the right track. If a reader simply removed the terms “capitalists” and “profiteers” from the narrative, and replaced them with “mercantilists” and “cronies,” it might make sense.

After all, capitalism should be understood as the free market, and “capitalists” should be seen as peaceful participants in such a market, while (as Adam Smith noted in the 18th Century) mercantilists profit off the back-and-forth favor-for-favor, crony glad-handing of political powers. And Keynes appears to be deriding not only the practice of special businesses getting the government graft and accruing assets while the currency is debased and the majority of consumers suffer, but also the practice of fiat-currency inflation via central banking itself.

Seems legit…

As the authors note:

“He (Keynes) then discussed inflation in the 1910s against the backdrop of war and revolution, and the social unrest that followed. ‘Lenin was certainly right,’ he concluded. ‘There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.’
Keynes’ economic writing ultimately gave birth to a ‘Keynesian’ school of economics, and he personally helped negotiate the international postwar monetary order at the Bretton Woods conference following World War II.”

And if one weren’t familiar with economics, history, and Keynes, one might think that Keynes was a diehard anti-inflationist, a “hard-money” guy who wanted citizens to be able to save, and who tried his darndest to keep fiat money under some kind of control, tied to a commodity to keep its value and prevent a central bank from just, oh, creating it out of thin air to buy government debt and facilitate runaway government spending and power.

Of course, the opposite is true.

And, like Lenin’s, Keynes’ ideas were some of the most destructive of the 20th Century.

Let’s Begin Phase Two, the Dissection

As background: the fundamental lever for economic growth is free will, economic freedom allows revelation of one's valuation of subjective effort, which sees division of labor, trade, the growth of a tradeable currency, and competition.

That competition - mixed with price signals based on the subjective valuations as revealed in every transaction – incentivizes competitors to strive to be more productive, offering customers more for less cash. This leads to better living standards, and to higher consumer savings. The savings are then levered, as investments, into new ventures that can further employ more people and better lives -- and the cycle continues, with savings leading to new investments -- all made by free individuals who only risk their own capital. Anytime one of those people fails, others can see the failure and adjust their behavior to do better. Thus, market competition based on a free market and a free market for currency (known as capitalism) always works towards what customers want and sees the money garner more for people, at lower prices, even while allowing savings to lever new ventures that can be tested at individual risk.

Keynes despised savings and believed those who saved were being "selfish." He also despised the idea of freedom in currency, which is a prerequisite for anything even close to a free market.

That, unto itself, tells us a great deal of how little Keynes understood markets and how firmly these Fortune authors cling to his misunderstanding.

But it gets worse.

Keynes didn't understand that any system caught within a central banking cartel (be it under the name of the government or under the government's issuance of a monopoly to a central bank, like the Federal Reserve) is not capitalism, it's collectivism. One of the key elements of Marx's Communist Manifesto was a government-run central bank to control the money supply, and Keynes fully agreed with the nonsense, applied in a fascist/cronyist way in the US and England.

Keynes advocated that a government-run central bank should pump out money without any tie to anything that consumers valued. He believed that the "value" of it should be mandated on the population by the government (i.e. "fiat" currency) and he thought that, if a sufficient amount of this "money" were pumped into the market -- along with “investments” made, not by individuals making their own decisions, but by the government/political class (fascism, again) -- this would lead to what he called "full employment."

Keynes's specious ideas held sway, on and off, and with and without the term "Keynesianism" attached to them from the time of the founding of the Federal Reserve (which occurred prior to Keynes formally releasing his doctrines), through the "New Deal" to today, with brief halts during Kennedy's era and Reagan's first term.

Keynesianism – through central banking and central planning (cronyism) and controls – is precisely what caused this inflationary problem.

What you read above is, in essence, a distillation of two lectures I used to offer to my students. The deeper nuances of how the central bank favors the politically connected are probably pretty obvious by now, but for many decades, most Americans were unaware of the rip-off and favoritism that helped the connected gain before the buying power of the inflated currency really started to drop.

We're experiencing the buying-power drop now, in a dramatic way. Bankruptcies are coming.

And it's going to accelerate, as per the predictions of those of us who tried to warn Keynesians.

If Keynes didn’t like the politically-connected getting more assets as the boom-bust cycle saw malinvestments rise during loose money periods and then saw the bankruptcies that followed, allowing the politically connected to get the goods, he sure didn’t show it. Every single “economic” policy he espoused leads to that end.

And a final thought.

Like a few other free-market economists, I tried to warn people about this prior to the 2008 collapse.

And, like those two Fortune authors, politicians were deaf to the alarms.

Today, thanks to them, this new economic crash is going to get much worse.

BUT, thanks to YOU for reading! As you no doubt know, it doesn't take a lot to learn about charlatans like Keynes and how closely he matched many of the Marxian goals with his warmed-over pseudo-economics. Sadly, few Americans will learn the lesson, even as they pay the price.

That’s it for now, fellow Conspirators for liberty… Thank you for being interested in the principles of freedom! Please be sure to SUBSCRIBE and to share! You can see my current novellas, available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I recommend “Fishing” if you want a dark, well-composed crime tale with some unusual turns…

…but feel free to grab “Bite” for a different take on vampirism, and “Wall” for a cryptoarcheological adventure set in 1960s China. And I have three novels and two more novellas that are on their way! Feel free to check out the Liberty Conspiracy channels on Odysee, Bitchute, and Rumble for non-fiction video content, and my work at MRCTV.org and their YouTube and Rumble channels! Be Seeing You!

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Gardner Goldsmith

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