No, Actually, Keynes Was Right About Everything, so Fuck Off, Ferguson!
“John Maynard Keynes was the sexiest economist who ever lived. This might seem like half-hearted praise since in our mind’s eye the typical economist appears as a dowdy and almost always balding man, full of prudential advice about thrift and the miracle of compound interest. Keynes, with his caterpillar moustache and mesmerizing bedroom eyes, cut a more dashing figure.
He had many lovers of both genders, and was married to one of the great beauties of the age, the ballerina Lydia Lopokova. His genius at playing the stock market allowed him to enjoy the life of bon vivant, socializing with the writers and artists of the Bloomsbury group such as Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster rather than dull number crunchers he knew at Cambridge and in the British Treasury. While other economists focused on maximizing economic growth, Keynes wanted to go further and maximize the pleasures of life.
Given all this, it’s perhaps not surprising that a much-publicized recent attack on the Keynesian policy of using government deficits to overcome economic recession resorted to homophobia to discredit it. Last Friday, in a question and answer session following his lecture, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson startled his audience at the Altegris Strategic Investment Conference in California by calling Keynes a childless gay man who couldn’t give his wife conjugal satisfaction and had no concern for the impact of deficits on posterity.”
Further in:
“The accusation was first made by the brilliant Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter, who in a 1946 obituary complained that Keynes “was childless and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy.” The words of Schumpeter—still remembered for his contention that capitalism rests on “creative destruction,” and a conservative who thought intellectuals such as Keynes were undermining the moral foundation of the free market—have been echoed by many other thinkers, including George Will, Gerturde Himmelfarb, Greg Mankiw, Mark Steyn, and V.S. Naipaul. (Himmelfarb argues that Keynes’s famous statement “In the long run we are all dead” has “an obvious connection with his homosexuality,” while Mark Steyn described the economist as a “childless homosexual” and “libertine.” Harvard economist Greg Mankiw also used the word “childless” to describe Keynes, raising the question, what’s wrong with Harvard?)”
Homo: the openness, magnanimity and wisdom of Keynes is in part rooted in his world-view and sexual life. Polyamorist, hedonist and passionate lover, he rejected the parsimonious model of the Victorian Household and its Rules (the ancestor of the current Hetero Model the Straight Gays are standing in line for), the root of mean-spiritedness and control that we despise root and branch. Indeed today’s economic woes reflect lessons learned in the starvation economy (both emotionally and economically) in families where most people grow up today. Ferguson, a thorough asshole of the lowest order, is a firm believer in “God and Country”.
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