Financial History Issue 125 (Spring 2018) | Page 13
EDUCATORS’ PERSPECTIVE
our gods for a little longer still. For only
they can lead us out of the tunnel of eco-
nomic necessity into the daylight.” In other
words, only avarice and usury and precau-
tion can lead to the end of capitalism.
Paul Samuelson, whose seminal textbook
Economics was used by millions of under-
graduate students, agreed with Keynes. He
even included two key paragraphs from
“Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchil-
dren” in later editions of Economics, noting
sadly that the affluence of the 1990s had not
brought about “the slackening of economic
ambition in America.”
Economist Robert Nelson argues that
Keynes, Samuelson and other progressives
believe God works “through economic
forces and is planning a glorious ending to
the world based on the workings of rapidly
advancing material productivity.” How-
ever, with the end of Keynes’s 100 years
approaching quickly (World War II not
withstanding), Nelson concludes “that the
faith in the redeeming power of material
progress is fading.” Instead of a new para-
digm, the problems of greed, avarice and
unbounded ambition are as severe as ever.
Material prosperity as a path to salvation is
nothing more than an illusion. The answers
lie elsewhere, but not in capitalism.
Philosopher Thomas Novak writes:
British economist John Maynard Keynes espoused the belief that only avarice,
usury and precaution could lead to the end of capitalism.
pressing economic cares, how to occupy
leisure, which science and compound inter-
est will have won for him, to live wisely and
agreeably and well.”
Keynes longed for the day when the
accumulation of wealth lost its luster. At
that point, he hoped for “great changes
in the code of morals” that would allow
us to do away with “many of the pseudo-
moral principles which have gag-ridden
us for two hundred years, by which we
have exalted the most distasteful of human
qualities into the position of the highest
virtues… The love of money as a pos-
session — as distinguished from the love
of money as a means to the enjoyments
and realities of life — will be recognized
for what it is, a somewhat disgusting
morbidity, one of those semi-criminal,
semi-pathological propensities which one
hands over with a shudder to the special-
ists in mental disease.”
Keynes saw us returning to traditional
religious principles where “avarice is a
vice,” usury “a misdemeanor” and the love
of money detestable. Yet he warned that
that time had not yet arrived. “For at least
a hundred years we must pretend to our-
selves…that fair is foul and foul is fair…
Avarice and usury and precaution must be
The realist revolutionary does not
believe that the overthrow of an evil
system will guarantee a better to
replace it. He does not glorify the
revolutionary struggle or the revolu-
tionary moment, for he does not con-
ceive that the source of evil lies in the
system to be overthrown. The realists
do not imagine that there has been, is
now, or ever will be a political econ-
omy from which evil will be banished.
Wherever there are human beings,
there will be evil. Because they do not
believe in a paradise on earth, or in an
innocent system, the realists are often
dismissed as mere ‘reformers.’ In fact,
their vision is revolutionary precisely
because they reject the moral pretenses
both of ancient traditional orders and
of contemporary utopian orders. The
utopias of the modern age strike them
as too like the theocracies and moral
tyrannies of the past.
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