(3 of 4)
A Savage World. Thorstein Veblen also cast a jaundiced eye on the bourgeoisie. A nonconformist who might have been one of Sinclair Lewis' village atheists, he was born on the American frontier of Norwegian parents. Among other peculiarities, he locked his watch to his vest with a large safety pin and he'd up his socks with two pins moored to his pants. His idea of a joke was to return a borrowed sack to a farmer with a hornet's nest inside. Acidly sardonic, he called religion "the fabrication of vendible imponderables in the nth dimension," religious organizations "chain stores," and individual churches "retail outlets." Women apparently could not resist him. nor he, them. "What are you to do if the woman moves in on you?" he once asked a friend.
In his books he savagely dissected early American capitalism—in a predatory era when Cornelius Vanderbilt could write to his associates: "Gentlemen, you have undertaken to ruin me. I will not sue you, for law takes too long. I will ruin you." Veblen took a closer look at the people Marx called the ruling class, and produced a new label: the leisure class. The businessman, to Veblen, was a saboteur of the economy, because instead of just sticking to making goods, he tried to regulate output in order to make more money. Eventually, thought Veblen, the engineers would inherit the world and run it properly. He died on the eve of the Great Depression. Perhaps his greatest merit, as Author Heilbroner makes clear, was that he saw one great truth Marx never saw: the "working class" had no real desire to rebel against the bourgeoisie, but wanted to become more like it.
A Sick World. John Maynard Keynes was a brilliant intellectual and financial operator who made a couple of million dollars dealing in international currencies and commodities half an hour each morning while still in bed. He wrote a mathematical masterpiece on probability, was the darling of the avant-garde Bloomsbury set, chairman of a life-insurance company, husband of a beautiful ballerina, a governor of the Bank of England, a spectacular bridge player. "The Architect of Capitalism Viable." as Author Heilbroner calls him. Keynes also wrote an intricate book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, drastically revising Adam Smith's view of capitalism. His conclusion: the market place is not a safe place; every boom is constantly threatened with collapse, any depression might last indefinitely. No moral question is involved. The system has a mechanical defect, and its price is high: unemployment. The solution. stated in its simplest form: government investment. The less radical of the British Socialists, e.g., the late Sir Stafford Cripps, followed Keynes (who died in 1946). Whatever may be said for or against him, Keynes was, essentially, the prophet of economic patchwork.