Free Republic

The World Economic Forum wasn’t the creation of Klaus Schwab, but was actually born out of a CIA-funded Harvard program headed by Henry Kissinger and pushed to fruition by John Kenneth Galbraith and Herman Kahn. All three men were members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Schwab is more than a technocrat and intends to fuse his physical and biological identities with future technology. Klaus Schwab’s main ideological product, “stakeholder capitalism”, will see the transfer of power away from true democratic processes and onto a system of governance by a small pre-selected leadership group, who will be trained to...

Soviet Communism, the dark tyranny that controlled nearly 40 nations and was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 100 million victims during the 20th century, suddenly collapsed 20 years ago without a shot being fired. In just two years--from 1989 to 1991--the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and Marxism- Leninism was dumped unceremoniously on the ash heap of history. There was dancing in the street and champagne toasts on top of the Brandenburg Gate. For 40 years, the United States and the West had been following a policy of containment, détente, accommodation. Ronald Reagan decided it was...

EK: You think the danger posed by the long-term deficit is overstated by most economists and economic commentators. JG: No, I think the danger is zero. It's not overstated. It's completely misstated.

"With the rise of the modern corporation, the emergence of the organization required by modern technology and planning and the divorce of the owner of capital from control of the enterprise, the entrepreneur no longer exists in the mature industrial enterprise." -- John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, chapter vi The role of entrepreneurs is one of those issues that divides people politically. If you value entrepreneurship, then it is difficult to be a statist. If you are a statist, then it is difficult to value entrepreneurship. John Kenneth Galbraith represents the quintessential statist. If we were literally stuck...

The public Galbraith I knew and contended with for many years is captured in the opening paragraphs of my review of his last book, "The Culture of Contentment." I wrote then: ` "It is fortunate for Professor Galbraith that he was born with singular gifts as a writer. It is a pity he hasn't used these skills in other ways than to try year after year to bail out his sinking ships. Granted, one can take satisfaction from his anti-historical exertions, and wholesome pleasure from his yeomanry as a sump-pumper. Indeed, his rhythm and grace recall the skills we remember...

Yesterday the New York Times reported the Norwegian financial newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv’s revelations that Peter Galbraith, a former US diplomat and advisor to the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq, stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from Iraqi oil revenues. Galbraith’s profits would result from his cashing in on his links to the Kurdish regional leadership, and his role in drafting Iraq’s Constitution, shortly after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. In 2004, Galbraith helped the Kurds arrange deals with Norwegian oil firm DNO and prepare for negotiations on the Iraqi Constitution, including controversial provisions on...

Many years ago, when I was a college student, I took a course from John Kenneth Galbraith. On the first day of class, Professor Galbraith gave a brilliant opening lecture, after which the students gave him a standing ovation. Galbraith kept on giving brilliant opening lectures the whole semester. But, instead of standing ovations, there were now dwindling numbers of students and some of them got up and walked out in the middle of his lectures. Galbraith never got beyond the glittering generalities that marked his first lecture. After a while, the students got tired of not getting any real...

Scion of America’s greatest Keynesian, James K. Galbraith recently penned one of the most astonishing near misses in recent memory. In the December/January edition of Mother Jones Galbraith accuses free-market economists starting with Adam Smith of being Intelligent Design (ID) hucksters. “Economists… have been Intelligent Designers since the beginning,” Galbraith writes. “Adam Smith was a deist; he believed in a world governed by a benevolent system of natural law… Smith's Creator did not interfere. He simply wrote the laws and left them for events to demonstrate and man to discover.” Galbraith’s analogy is badly forced. But it is forced ultimately...