One of the most offensive and anti-human assertions put
forward by John Maynard Keynes is the claim that the State has the power to
re-edit the dictionary. At first glance,
Keynes’s claim (made in the opening passages of the work he intended as his magnum opus, his two-volume A Treatise on Money) was simply one more
contradiction in a body of work filled with contradictions, half-truths, and
baseless assertions.
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| Keynes: prosperity for all only if restricted to the few. |
For example, there is the demonstrably false claim Keynes
made in the book that established his reputation as the Greatest Economist Who
Ever Lived . . . and which necessarily implied that distributism is an
impossible dream:
“The immense accumulations of
fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the
half century before [World War I], could never have come about in a Society
where wealth was divided equitably.” (John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), II.iii.)
Viewed objectively, however, and considered as a thesis
statement by Keynes to summarize his entire economic theory, Keynes’s assertion
that the State has the power to re-edit the dictionary becomes even more bizarre,
a blithe declaration of pure moral relativism.
It is the epitome of the positivism Pope Pius XI condemned in his first
encyclical in 1922, Ubi Arcano Dei
Consilio (“On the Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ”), “There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism
which We condemn, no less decidedly than We condemn theological modernism.” (§
61)
Yes, we are aware that we used the
term “positivism” and Pius XI used the term “modernism.” Modernism, however, is simply a form of
religious positivism, so calm yourself.
Briefly, to oversimplify somewhat, modernism/positivism means violating
the first principle of reason (the principle of identity) by changing the
meanings of things to suit yourself in whatever way seems expedient to
you. (And, again, yes, we know that
positivism has other definitions, but they boil down to that, one way or
another.)
So how did Keynes put it? Not forgetting that Keynes derived some of his economic theories from Walter Bagehot, who was influenced by the totalitarian philosopher Thomas Hobbes:
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| Hobbes: the State is a Mortall God with absolute power. |
“It is a peculiar characteristic
of money contracts that it is the
State or Community not only which
enforces delivery, but also which decides what it is that must be delivered as
a lawful or customary discharge of a contract which has been concluded in
terms of the money-of-account. The State, therefore, comes in first of all as the authority of law which
enforces the payment of the thing which corresponds to the name or description
in the contract. But it comes in doubly
when, in addition, it claims the right to determine and declare what thing corresponds to the name, and
to vary its declaration from time to time — when, that is to say, it claims the
right to re-edit the dictionary. This
right is claimed by all modern States and has been so claimed for some four
thousand years at least. It is when this stage in the evolution of money has been reached that Knapp’s
Chartalism — the doctrine that money is peculiarly a creation of the State — is fully realized.” (John
Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money, Volume I: The Pure Theory of
Money. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930, 4.)
In other words, according to Keynes, the State has the right
to interfere in any and all contracts, and even create unilateral
agreements. That’s because one of the
fine distinctions Keynes failed to note in his statement is that all money is a
contract, just as (in a very real sense) all contracts are money.
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| "Let your yes mean yes, and your no mean no": what a concept! |
That being the case, Jesus’s injunction, “But let your speech be yea,
yea: no, no: and that which is over and above these, is of evil” (Matt. 5:37)
becomes utterly meaningless. The meaning
of words, agreements, free association, private property, even life itself
becomes negotiable if the State is powerful enough to step in and start
dictating — there’s a reason the totalitarian State is called a “dictatorship”
and the State’s mouthpiece is the “dictator.”
Why,
however, did Keynes consider the power to re-edit the dictionary and change all
contracts and agreements at will so important?
Because (and this is a key point) it is the only way to circumvent the
presumed iron bonds of the slavery of past savings . . . assuming that it is
otherwise impossible to emancipate humanity from the slavery of past savings,
of course. . . .
That
is, if
past savings is the only source of financing for new capital formation, then
the only way to make everyone an owner of capital is to re-edit the dictionary
and change what “ownership” means!
The
problem is that ownership — private property — along with life and liberty
(free association/contract) is a natural right.
That means it’s part of the definition of what it means to be
human. You can’t re-edit the dictionary
in any matter touching the natural law without thereby changing the definition
of what it means to be human . . . or divine.
Man is no longer man, and God is no longer God.
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| God created man in His own image, or so Chesterton and Belloc had it. |
That
didn’t bother Keynes, of course. He was
an atheist and didn’t believe in God, anyway.
The problem for neo-distributists and neo-Chestertonians, however, was that
Chesterton and Belloc did believe in
God, and were rather specific about what they believed:
·
God
is an omniscient and omnipotent infinitely perfect Being,
·
Who
created infinitely perfectible humanity in His own image and likeness with free
will,
·
Who
built the capacity to acquire and develop the natural virtues of prudence,
temperance, fortitude, and justice into human nature,
·
Who
infused the capacity to acquire and develop the supernatural virtues of faith,
hope, and charity into humanity as an irrevocable free gift, and
·
Who endowed human nature itself (and thus every
single human being) with the natural rights of life, liberty, and private
property to be able to acquire and develop both natural and supernatural virtue
through the free, yet socially determined exercise of those rights.
The obvious problem for Keynes — or anyone else who wanted
to try and circumvent the slavery of past savings — is that there is absolutely
no room in the Catholic Church’s Aristotelian-Thomism philosophy for re-editing
the dictionary. Since the natural law is
based on God’s “image and likeness” reflected in humanity, the natural law cannot
be changed without either making God less than God, or humanity other than
human.
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| Can't stay where you are and can't go forward. . . . |
Neither Chesterton nor Belloc was willing to do any such
thing. That meant that they were stuck,
and could neither stay where they were nor move forward. They were, essentially, frozen into
inactivity by the slavery of past savings.
. . . but only as long as they insisted on accepting that
past savings are the only source of financing for new capital formation. Perhaps the real “tragedy” of Chesterton and
Belloc is that, unlike Mortimer Adler, they never met Louis Kelso. Chesterton died in 1936 when Kelso was
beginning to formulate his ideas, and Belloc died in 1953, five years before
Kelso and Adler published their mistitled collaboration, The
Capitalist Manifesto.
There was another problem as well. It seems that many neo-distributists and
neo-Chestertonians (along with a number of others) did not submit to the
constraints imposed by the strict Aristotelian-Thomism of the social teachings
of the Catholic Church — and there was a framework ready to hand that appeared
to give them everything they thought they wanted. All it took, as we will see in the next
posting in this series, was “one twist to the mind” based on the belief that “if
once we will grant [the modern philosopher] this, the rest will be easy; he
will straighten out the world.”
Yes — just as allowing Keynes’s one little twist of absolute
State power has straightened out the global economy. . . .