It occurred to me today that Keynes latter career can be summarized as creating a body of thought that, when implemented, would in Hayek’s terms Act For prosperity, but in reality Act To poverty and increased governmental control. You create a plausible pretext, all while knowing that to the extent people followed your ideas, they would get the opposite.
He further immunized his system from criticism by making it tautological: if you spend money to boost the economy and the economy improves, then it was your doing. If you spend money and it fails, then you didn’t spend enough. Add to this the fundamental insight that politicians never balance budgets, and you have debt accumulating day-in, day-out for decades.
This is the result that has in fact been achieved. He also has in place his “semi-autonomous bodies”, like Fannie Mae, the IMF, the World Bank, and of course the Federal Reserve. To this I would add semi-autonomous AGENCIES, like the FDA, the EPA, the Dept. of Homeland Security, etc. Practically, many of these agencies can escape the scrutiny of Congress. They enable Obama to execute policies by fiat, rather than by legislation.
The aim was for wealth to be less important, as Keynes himself said, and his hope–pathetic and ungrounded as it may have been–that people without money would find better sources of meaning that he achieved in his own life.