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While Austrian economists from Ludwig von Mises to Henry Hazlitt to Murray Rothbard have dealt with the various fallacies that John Maynard Keynes laid out in The General Theory and other works—and they are legion—only Rothbard chose to deal with the philosophical/moral aspects of Keynes’s viewpoints in Keynes, the Man, and he finds that these viewpoints indeed influenced his economic thinking. …
Yet, both Rothbard and Hunter Lewis—author of Where Keynes Went Wrong—indicate that the anti-savings and pro-free spending views that dominate The General Theory have their roots in the moral worldviews that Keynes held. Rothbard notes that one of the driving forces in Keynes’s economic worldview was,
…his deep hatred and contempt for the values and virtues of the bourgeoisie, for conventional morality, for savings and thrift, and for the basic institutions of family life. …
So, why claim that Keynesian economics is immoral? It is because Keynesians economists claim that by creating new money and increasing spending, the government can create new wealth that will spur economic growth. That is a lie, period. As Murray Rothbard has noted, new money creation and borrowing and spending simply transfers wealth from those who are in line to receive the new money from those who will receive that money much later. To add insult to injury, the recipients of the new money generally are wealthier than the people who have wealth transferred from them. That is because the first in line for new money see a rise in their incomes but pay for goods at the current prices.
However, as the new money works its way through the economy, prices increase, so those who are at the “back of the line” will pay the higher prices but will not see the same increase in their own incomes. This is where the wealth transfers take place, and there is nothing mysterious about it. The economy may seem to be “stimulated,” but the inflation actually undermines the economy.
Given Keynes’s arrogance and his contempt for savers and the British bourgeoisie in general, it is not surprising that he would advocate an economic system built upon fraud. Furthermore, given that Keynes’s views mirror those of American, British, and European elites, no one should be shocked that they would endorse the Keynesian schemes. “Immoralists,” as one might expect, will support immoral economics.
So, here we are now, after suffering the state’s romance with Keynesian economics, with a collapsing economy due to changes in time preferences and no reserves for productive investments. Keynes’ “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die,” philosophy has been the hallmark of how the state sees itself as running the economy and we are suffering for it. Is the Keynes philosophy moral or immoral? I guess it depends upon how you look at the results of high time preferences: spendthrift, forced bankruptcies and criminal behavior because people need it now and not later. A good example of high time preference is the looting of stores during riots. If you like Keynes, you’ll probably like looting, right?
This system has eroded the level of society incredible. Recently I looked at an immigrant stories documentary in NY. These people arrived from Italy and Ireland for example. and they had been fleeing from the famine and misery. But there was still the bias of working and creating wealth, they came from the previous decades to the two great wars that were the link to kill hard money and bring to all the hands of all of us the soft and lies money. These people worked, founded companies and businesses that allowed them to create wealth and thus progress in the US land. The point of this is the big difference with the migrants who arrive in this era, who their main motivation is to go to the US to have "aid" and social programs that allow them to live from the State. It is a big difference the level of thought that migrants had 50 years ago or 100 years ago, with those who arrive in this last decade. And all that is an effect of the fiduciary financial system in which we live.
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Yes, this is the result of raising the time preference of people in this country. There are no savings, therefore no investment. And, no, what the state does is not investment, they only consume. When the give aid to people, it is to spend, without saving and therefore no investments. Now, immigrants are coming for all the freebies from the pockets of the taxpayer, therefore crowding out taxpayer savings. We are now swirling down the toilet because of what you descirbed!
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If I totally agree, although I do not consider that immigrants take the money of the taxpayers, that only happened in the past that governments used tax money, today I dare to say that the theft they apply to each of us (taxes) will stop to the pockets of politicians. In this century and under Keynesian doctrine, the State does not need to take money from citizens through taxes to carry out public works. Recall that the State has the ability to print the amount they need to cover all the expenses that government management can generate, so if they have that ability to create money from nothing, because they continue to remove money as a tribute? Because they are stealing us, there is no other reason.
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Stealing money through inflation hits the people further from the source of the newly printed money the hardest, thus get the most value fo money stolen. It is still theft whether they take it in taxes or inflation (only the increase in the supply of money).
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