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To: ABrit
Keynes was a Communist. He designed a system that was intended to pauperise the Capitalist bourgoisie.

Not so much, if the word "Communist" actually means anything.

Really, you only have to think of what communism actually was in those days when Lenin and Stalin were still around to see that Keynes's policy wasn't the expropriation of private enterprises and state ownership and control.

Keynes did have it in for people who lived off investments or rents, though, and supported "the euthanasia of the rentier," -- or the gradual disappearance of the "functionless investor."

It was not to be violent expropriation, but a gradual result of economic change, replacing passive collection of dividends with active investment in the economy -- at least according to Keynes (or what I've been able to find out about Keynes's thinking in five minutes).

Keynes's hostility to inherited wealth and passive investment was strange because he and his friends and associates and the colleges he worked for all benefited from investments, dividends, and inherited wealth.

8 posted on 01/29/2013 5:53:06 PM PST by x
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To: x
Some things to consider:
There is no proof that Keynes was a member of the Communist party, and never, that I know of, advocated for state ownership of all private property.
Keynes did advocate for a governing body to control the world's finances. In his papers he called the members the ‘salatariat’. An educated elite of people much like himself to run an international world bank which would use a currency called the ‘Bancor’ to settle international accounts, and eventually replace the gold standards of the day.
He pushed these at Bretton Woods after WWII along with FDR's representative, Harry Dexter White, who was revealed to be a Communist agent in the Venona Files after the USSR broke up. He was certainly a Fabian Socialist as were all the members of the Bloomsbury Group to which he belonged.
9 posted on 01/29/2013 8:55:46 PM PST by Old North State
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