I recommend this book from time to time. That was where I pulled the Stuart Chase quote from, and where he quotes Mussollini calling Keynes ideas “pure fascism”.
I was unable to validate all the personal crimes he catalogues in the chapter on moral depravity, except the note Keynes wrote to Strachey about “bed and boy” being cheap in Tunis. One wonders how any positive spin can be put on that; that he was referring to pedophilia and child prostitution seems almost inescapable.
One last comment I will add is that it is interesting to me to note how much people assume of our world. Things happen in a certain way, in a certain order, day after day after day, so they complacently believe that they must always remain that way.
I was on a 12′ ladder the other day, working over peoples desks with them at them, with two pairs of pliers, removing 3# speakers. Some of the people were alert enough to realize that pliers do not always remain in hands. Most of them were not. They were at their desks, that was their place, and I was just going to have to deal with it. That is perhaps understandable, but I was not the one risking something dropping on my head from 15′.
There is a book called Deep Survival, which is uneven, but which makes some good points. He goes through some tragic accidents, and points out that quite often they happen because people blindly ASSUME that things do not change. A group of snowmobilers was killed in what I believe was an avalanche, after going up a hill they had gone up dozens of times. They knew that conditions were right for disaster, but it was THAT HILL, they knew it, it was their friend. Nothing had ever happened before. How could it happen now?
Many of the people out there today are the same. They blithely assume that since America has been free for 200 years (to varying degrees, depending on who you are or were), that it will always remain free. This is mouth-breathing complacency at its worst. So is trusting “governemnt” to fix anything. History is quite clear that if you are going to get some large-scale disaster–like war or tyranny–then it starts with the government. There are no examples of corporations exercising direct power (outside of, perhaps, the British East India Company, which however itself was a Crown-granted monopoly), but history is little BUT the naked abuse of power by governments. That is not the exception, it is the rule.
No one living today should be so stupid as not to realize that.