Re: cranks

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

michael perelman wrote:

>I run a similar list.  At times [probably less than 10], I have asked
>various people to depart.  My decisions have been very controversial.  Many
>have protested my "censorship."
>
>Many people have suggested an alternative on pen-l.  Maybe it would work
>here.  Just shun the cranks.  If no one responds, maybe they will go away.
>I would love to see it work here.

Michael does an admirable job of running PEN-L, and with a very unobtrusive
hand. But, aside from issues of list management, I was also asking if there
was something in Keynes that attracted cranks. My thesis, which I've
spouted here before, and at greater length in my book, is that Keynes, like
the cranks, seemed to think that the problems of capitalist society,
particularly instability and polarization, could be fixed by largely
monetary interventions. Keynes was obviously a lot more sophisticated about
this, but his apologia for Major Douglas was, as the vulgar Marxists used
to say, no accident. Having embraced Marx's M-C-M' formula in developing
his monetary theory of production, Keynes conveniently forgot that lesson
in proposing the euthanasia of the rentier. But the rentier is as much a
creature of capitalism as the industrialist.

Doug