Thank you for your comment.
‘How do you know which activities I pursue? I would be really interested.’
At the least, Keynes was a fascinating and complex man, thinker and being! Full of contradictions, but none the less worthy of the readers attention and critical evaluation. I must be blunt, you are a rather grey technocrat, whose rhetoric and status demands hyperbole/polemic. You are one of the many experts/technocrats, at The Financial Times, who write apologetics for the failure of the Free Market Mythology, that has yet to manifest its powers of self-rescue: where is the Self-Correcting Market, nine years after the 2008 Crash and the Depression that is its continuing legacy? And then you and your political fellow travelers agonize over the ‘Rebellion Against the Elites’ that evolved into the Populist Menace, and the Brexiteers. Even the legitimacy of European nation state is under attack :
https://www.ft.com/europopulists
https://www.ft.com/topics/places/Catalonia
https://www.ft.com/content/38f625f6-b7dc-11e7-8c12-5661783e5589
The successors of The Mont Pelerin Society convenes at the FT! Keynes is certainly the rescuer of Capitalism, although his insights accomplished that until the benighted reign of Thatcher/Reagan. In the time of Adam Smith capitalism was emancipatory from the predations of English feudalism, and probably for others, in our time who form co-operatives to sell the goods and services to their fellow citizens, if their aspiration/practice is not stopped by government or some Multi-National! Monsanto sues small farmers for ‘patent infringement’ .
On the question of China, read the whole of my comment on the amount that it spent in 2013 on ‘Internal Security‘!
What of the rebellions and suicides of worker at Foxxconn:
How many reforms of Capitalism will it take? As Manfred Max Neef pointed out long ago the model of growth must be supplanted by the model of development if we are to survive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_Max_Neef
Global Capital has its collection of front men: Lloyd Blankfein of ‘We are doing God’s Work’. Or vulture Capitalist Paul Singer, who made obscene profit out of rescuing Argentina from the predations of the de Kirchners. Mr. Singer is an avid contributor to Neo-Conservative causes:
https://www.thenation.com/article/meet-marco-rubios-far-right-neocon-donors/
You wish to be invited back by the Chinese, and your rhetoric reflects your courtship of Xi Jinping and his confederates, that becomes ‘The results were spectacular.’ You soften your critique as the in-order-to of your courtship: not quite in Walter Duranty territory, but uncomfortably close!
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/24/books/the-journalist-and-the-dictator.html?pagewanted=all
Let me close by offering this valuable observation by Perry Anderson on polemic. I write polemic.
Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.
Perry Anderson
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