Sumitra Shah wrote:
> James C.W. Ahiakpor  wrote on: Wednesday, November 16, 2011 2:07 PM
>
> "Frankly, I don't understand what Isaac fails to understand about what I
> wrote.  I take Keynes at his word, and I accept the views of his
> contemporaries that Keynes was capable of clear expressions.  As Roy
> Harrod (1936), for example, wrote of him, Keynes was someone "capable of
> matchless lucidity.""
>
> Then maybe we should take him at his word when he writes in the concluding notes (last chapter) of GT:
>
> Keynes: Thus, apart from the necessity of central controls to bring about an adjustment between the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest, there is no more reason to socialise economic life than there was before.
>
> And on the next page:
> Keynes: ... there will still remain a wide field for the exercise of private initiative and responsibility. Within this field the traditional advantages of individualism will still hold good...But above all, individualism, if it can be purged of its defects and its abuses, is the best safeguard of personal liberty in the sense that, compared with any other system, it greatly widens the field for the exercise of personal choice. It is also the best safeguard of the variety of life, which emerges precisely from this extended field of personal choice, and the loss of which is the greatest of all losses of the homogeneous or totalitarian state.
>
Nice try, Sumitra, except that it is not very helpful to read 
chronologically backwards.  After Keynes wrote these words in the last 
chapter, he then wrote the Preface to the German edition to the /General 
Theory /(1936, pp. xxv-xxvii).  He opens the fourth paragraph with, 
"Perhaps, therefore, I may expect less resistence from German, than from 
English, readers in offering a theory of employment and output as a 
whole, which departs in important respects from the orthodox 
tradition."  (I'm quoting from my own copy; Alan, apparently, doesn't 
have one.)
The next paragraph has, "Nevertheless the theory of  output as a whole, 
which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more 
easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the 
theory of the production and distribution of a given output produced 
under conditions of free competition and a large measure of 
laissez-faire."  This paragraph appears so clear to me that I don't need 
someone else pretending to have a better facility in expressing one's 
thought in English than Keynes had to explain it to me, whether such 
attempted "interpretation" is published in the /Cambridge Journal of 
Economics/ or any such journal.
I also think Sumitra has failed to pay attention to the significant 
caveats in Keynes's passages above.  What does "the necessity of central 
controls to bring about an adjustment between the propensity to consume 
and the inducement to invest" entail?  How does a government manage to 
control a people's propensity to consume?  Is such control compatible 
with individual liberty, the course championed by Hayek and Friedman and 
their MPS colleagues?   I think it is such fears that led Henry Simon 
(1936) to "mention the possibilities of [Keynes's] book [becoming] the 
economic bible of a fascist movement."
Keynes also says, "individualism, if it can be purged of its defects and 
its abuses."  What are the defects of individualism that Keynes has in 
mind?  How are or can they be purged?  I asked Alan yesterday to think 
about Keynes's aim to see through the euthenasia of the rentier class 
and thus appreciate why Keynes would say that his theory was "more 
easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state."  Instead, he 
chose to truncate my message and then declare me as having grossly 
misinterpreted Keynes and also asked me to read someone else's 
restatement of Keynes's preface!   I think it is such mental laziness 
that keeps some people ever in the fog, unable to catch the clues to 
what they've been missing.
James Ahiakpor
-- 
James C.W. Ahiakpor, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Economics
California State University, East Bay
Hayward, CA 94542
(510) 885-3137 Work
(510) 885-4796 Fax (Not Private)