Holy ****, what a concept!

Political Evolution

There perhaps will always be “politics”, like also “death and taxes”. But it is sometimes remarkable how political contexts can evolve. And in relation to that I think that it is possible that “the Keynesians” are like a political faction that will become less influential as a result of political evolution. The “Keynesian” view of things did not come into existence until after the time when what we can call “Bolshevik communism” had become established in Russia. And by this label we wish to differentiate between any theoretical or ideal concept of communism and the actual form of governing regime structure that came to exercise state power in Moscow. (All over the world varieties of states make claims to have governments very properly or even ideally devoted to the interests of the citizens or nationals of those states and always an externally located critic can argue that the government is actually a sort of despotism.) The Keynesians implicitly always have the argument that some good managers can do things of beneficial value, operating with the treasury and the central bank, and that it is not needed or appropriate for the citizenry or the “customers” of the currency supplied by the state to actually understand, while the managers are managing, what exactly they are doing and how it will affect the “pocketbook” circumstances of these customers.

I see this as analogous to how the “Bolshevik communists” were claiming to provide something much better than the “bourgeois democracy” that they could not deny existed in some other countries. But in the end the ”dictatorship of the proletariat” seemed to become rather exposed as simply the dictatorship of the regime. So there may be an analogy to this as regards those called ”the Keynesians” in that while they have claimed to be operating for high and noble objectives of general welfare what is clearly true is that they have made it easier for governments to “print money”.

So I see the Keynesians as in a weak sense comparable to the “Bolsheviks” because of the support of both parties for a certain “lack of transparency” relating to the functions of government as seen by the citizenry. And for both of them it can be said that they tend to think in terms of government agencies operating in a benevolent fashion that is, however, beyond the comprehension of the citizens of the state. And this parallel makes it seem not implausible that a process of political evolution might lead to the expectation on the part of citizens in the “great democracies” that they should be better situated to be able to understand whatever will be the monetary policies which, indeed, are typically of great importance to citizens who may have alternative options for where to place their “savings”.