Steven Hayward at Powerline is wondering that which some enterprising journalist uninterested in keeping his gig (since I’m sure he’d soon be blacklisted) should take to Paul Krugman:
So Paul Krugman phoned in his periodic “Keynes Was Right” column today, arguing that the Obama Porkulus failed only because, like “true” Communism, it wasn’t tried vigorously or faithfully enough.
I wonder if Krugman also credits Keynes’s views on Jews, which British blogger Damian Thompson of The Telegraph brings to our attention. From Keynes’s diary:
[Jews] have in them deep-rooted instincts that are antagonistic and therefore repulsive to the European, and their presence among us is a living example of the insurmountable difficulties that exist in merging race characteristics, in making cats love dogs …
It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains.
Thompson adds:
If Keynes was an intellectual hero of the Right, rather than the Left, do you think those quotes would be so little known?
Anti-Semitism used to be a property of the Right, yet it’s worth pointing out that today many of the intellectual heroes of the right are Jews, such as Milton Friedman, Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol, etc., or that anti-Semitism has become almost wholly the province of the Left today.
Perhaps a host of Jewish comedians could tour the country with the sole purpose of pushing “against those who are exhibiting behavior which is less than consistent with the values of this nation” and fight the Jewaphobia running rampant in leftist circles and particularly in the hallways where the nation’s newspaper of record is published.
Imagine with me what the outcry would be if a conservative columnist was singing the praises of an economic policy put forth by someone who said the sort of things of Arabs that Keynes has said of Jews.
Back when slavery was a common thing (Egyptian Pharoahs, Greece, Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire, even the early Holy Roman Empire) various peoples were enslaved and used for things they were good at.
Over time, a selective breeding of those slaves (through their owners’ control) led to some slaves who were great at physical labor, others who could keep the books.
As far back as the slavery in Egypt it was realized that Jews were good at keeping books.
Joseph kept the books for his pharoah.
For modern men to be prejudiced against how well Jews today can handle money matters is as weird as being prejudiced against blacks who have great endurance.
It was selectively bred into both groups by lazy slave owners.
So, Keynes was mad that “Jews had all the brains” compared with his European yobs?
Yes, he should be excoriated for holding that view.
And so should his modern-day followers.
This is on the same lousy level as the beliefs of Margaret Sanger whose racist views led her to found Planned Parenthood.