Keynes was wrong because he failed to consider class conflict

This presumes that the poverty of 1920 is comparable to the poverty of today, which is obviously false.

What Keynes and this author both ignore is that the technological advancements did happen, and quality of life did improve, but most of the gains were monopolized into the hands of the few. There are no natural pressures to turn these productivity gains back over to the people who created them.

This author toys with the gig economy but entirely fails to notice that it too is being held in the hands of the few rather than the many.

What bothers me about the insights of Marx is a capitulation to monopolies but instead of allowing capital to control them it imagines a central party is the best mechanism to control it. In both cases, the obvious answer is to get of centralization in all it's forms.

this seems like an obvious thing to socialize: fiat money is granted value by the assent of all (backed by the monopoly on violence of the government) so why on earth allow a barely-concealed private cartel to manage it via credit expansion?

why is it only libertarians who talk about this, typically in terms of private money? maybe I'm just ignorant and there is a lot of content on this topic someone can point me to?

Rather than simply "class conflict," it's a theory of power in general that he was lacking, other than the abstract spending power of currency. He didn't understand that people who had everything that they could possibly buy would still be unhappy (even be driven by unhappiness) because others weren't suffering sufficiently. Or as Veblen explained, that people would be upset at the existence of less virtuous people who had as much as themselves, or alternatively upset that their lack of comfort advertised a lack of virtue. Or even:

> “Keynes also underestimated the competitive drive that fuels the relentless quest for wealth and social status. The wealthy, in particular, are often motivated by a desire to maintain their relative standing, leading to an endless competition for supremacy.”

Bill Mitchell also seems not to have a theory of power that I can recognize. Or he's simply lost all hope; I don't know that declaring that production and ownership should volunteer to shift itself is more reasonable than thinking that power could be morally and logically argued into relinquishing itself. Of course, the dope he's quoting thinks that power already has volunteered to give itself away, but of course the New Yorker would say that.

In the Stalin-Wells talk, Keynes directly confronts soft socialism to hard Bolshevism in Shaw, Stalin and Wells with infinite confidence in his knowledge of how economics should work, but carries that cockiness into a unearned belief that he understood the psychology of the captains of industry and government. His pages are an interesting window, and it tells you all you need to know about capitalism that it is nearly impossible to google, nobody is distributing it, and it may be against the law to share this 1934 pamphlet.**

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[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Dexter_White

[**] downloadable at: https://theverbatimrecord.wordpress.com/

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It's no surprise he needs poverty levels to be worse than in the 1930s to push for Marxism, but the actual reduction in poverty has been ginormous.

"The estimates presented in this chapter show that between 1820 and 2018 the prevalence of extreme poverty across the globe fell from 76% to 10%, the lowest level ever achieved, according to our method... This reduction, however, is not distributed evenly throughout the period.

It took 136 years from 1820 for our global poverty rate to fall under 50%,

then another 45 years to cut this rate in half again by 2001.

In the early 21st century, global poverty reduction accelerated, and in 13 years our global measure of extreme poverty was halved again by 2014. "

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/e20f2f1a-en/index.html?i...