[Travis McGee]

Keynes was asked what would happen in the long run with his theories.

He said, "In the long run, we're all dead." In other words, "The hell with your grandkids, live for today."

Well that childless old queen is long dead, but his "long run" has arrived, and we must pay the bill at last.

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."

-~~Ludwig Von Mises

"If recession should threaten serious consequences for business (as is not indicated at present) there is little doubt that the Federal Reserve System would take steps to ease the money market, and so check the movement."

~~Harvard Economic Society, October 19, 1929

"Business will turn for the better this month or next, recovering vigorously in the third quarter and end the year substantially above normal."

~~Harvard Economic Society, May 17, 1930

“Several brokerage houses tumbled; blue-sky investment companies formed during the happy bull market days went to smash, disclosing miserable tales of rascality; over a thousand banks caved in during 1930, as a result of marking down both of real estate and of securities; and in December occurred the largest bank failure in American financial history, the fall of the ill-named Bank of the United States in New York.”

~~"Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s" by Fredrick Lewis Allen

[Leisler]

We have had all our eggs put in the Federal basket and then didn’t watch it. Even if we did watch it, we were told our eyes lie. When Secretary Paulson says he must have 700 billion, in days, to buy home mortgages, and then days after the bill says he’s not going to buy mortgages, we like good Germans did Hitler, pretend he never lied to us.

[Cicero]

Keynes was asked what would happen in the long run with his theories. He said, "In the long run, we're all dead." In other words, "The hell with your grandkids, live for today."

As you note, Keynes was a homosexual, one of several in his intellectual circle. One problem with homosexuals is that they have no real families, so they don't think about the next generation or care about the future. It's all about them, and all about now. Eat, drink, and be merry, and the hell with other people's kids.

[arthurus]

I remember seeing speculation that Keynes wrote his Treatise as a sort of schoolboy parody sort of in the făshion of some "scientific" papers that have got published by "peer reviewed" journals only to turn out to be college pranks. The book certainly reads that way. Paragraphs do not hang together and contradictions abound. Sentences do not make sense but have scientific sounding words in them. Conclusions do not follow from stated premises. I have tried to tread the book a couple of times and made it all the way through finally a few years ago.It would be easy reading, I guess, for people who just look for the conclusions and do not try to understand the "arguments." The treatise got popular with politicians because it gave justifications for control of the economy by a band of "experts" operating fiscal policy from the government center. That is why it has retained its popularity and the gravity imputed to it by Harvard and government "economists." When it got famous and often cited to support various government policies back in the 30s I guess the good lord Keynes kind of liked that and kept his mouth shut about the parody.