Things Liberals Believe That Ain't So. Part XXVII

It's not that liberals believe in power, or that liberals believe that they know best, or that liberals believe they are more evolved than other people.

The big problem is the things that liberals know that ain't so.

And one of the things that liberals know is that corporations are uniquely powerful entities that must be ruthlessly controlled. Otherwise they will take over and return us to the days of the early industrial revolution.

That's what the chaps at The Nation believe, and that is what all the liberals believe in the precious places, like Cambridge, Berkeley, and Austin.

But here are quotes dug up by Kevin Williamson. Surely, if the sainted liberal that invented Keynesian economics, John Maynard Keynes, thinks that businessmen are wimps, then it must be so.

Here is Lord Keynes, the inventor of modern Keynesian stimulus, writing after the end of World War I when everyone was enraged about "war profiteers."

We are thus faced in Europe with the spectacle of an extraordinary weakness on the part of the great capitalist class, which has emerged from the industrial triumphs of the nineteenth century, and seemed a very few years ago our all-powerful master. The terror and personal timidity of the individuals of this class is now so great, their confidence in their place in society and their necessity to the social organism so diminished, that they are the easy victims of intimidation.

So just what are we supposed to believe about those awful businessmen, demoralized by a few radical politicians?

Here now is Keynes writing to FDR. Here is what he said about businessmen.

Businessmen have a different set of delusions from politicians, and need, therefore, different handling. They are, however, much milder than politicians, at the same time allured and terrified by the glare of publicity, easily persuaded to be “patriots,” perplexed, bemused, indeed terrified, yet only too anxious to take a cheerful view, vain perhaps but very unsure of themselves, pathetically responsive to a kind word. You could do anything you liked with them, if you would treat them (even the big ones), not as wolves and tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish.

Yet our liberal friends insist that businessmen are dangerous carnivores feasting off the browsing herbivores of the middle class, and that liberals with elephant guns are needed to keep the businessmen in their place.

It really isn't so, liberals. The dangerous ones are the crony capitalists: the bankers that politicians need to float their paper and help deliver easy money, the green capitalists feasting on the politicians' fantasies of cheap, clean energy, the Iowa corn farmers earning fat profits from the politicians' ethanol scam.

In other words, the only bad businessman is a crony capitalist created by some stupid liberal program.