Relevance of Keynes today

I think it's interesting and somewhat humorous that Keynes is being invoked all over the place but that, as usual, no one has actually read him.

The book was "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money," written in 1935. The Great Depression was still raging, and politicians, economists and business men were were preoccupied with the main problem of money societies, i.e., the business cycle. To make matters even more urgent, the severities of these cycles over the 150 years before the Great Depression had given great impetus to communism. Analyzing from within a particular capitalist economy, there didn't appear to be a way (nor has one really been discovered since) of stopping the cycle of shortage/demand, followed by overproduction to meet that demand, followed by depressions caused by the overhang of supply.* As long as a culture has only one way of valuing individuals in a society, i.e., by their productivity and net worth, the poor and unproductive will always be despised. Prevalent Christianity and Judaism took some of the sting away, but now that that's gone those left out have no recourse but (mostly talking about) political action.

The most cogent recent thinking on these issues and the supersession of controls by governments over credit and money supply by an amorphous international hoard of capital accountable to no one, has come from a few left-wing Italians.

13th century in France (please give me some leeway here) had it all figured out, and while it's been 25 years or more since I last glanced at the Keynes book,* which had been a bible until at least 1950, I believe Keynes cited the example of Chartres. That region of France was rich enough to be able to produce a surplus of food with, let's say 75% of the work force for the sake of argument. What to do with the rest? The answer is, "Build a cathedral." That society was wise and devout enough to value building the cathedral, which in economic terms was hardly a capital asset, equally with growing crops and building houses, etc.

We desperately need an equivalent of building the cathedral. Stiff-necked outcries against the excesses of business by those of lesser economic means won't do, just as business arrogance and belittling of the poorer won't do. These are just two sides to everybody's preoccupation with and valuing of money. Valuing, say, Peace Corps or national service is a start, but we need the old maid school teacher and the nun-nurse back. We need dignity for the housewife and mother. But mostly we need a place for those not employed productively in the econmic sense, where they can be entitled to nurture, health care, etc. As it stands now, I and others are opposed to extending health care coverage because under the prevalent value system it makes no sense to keep an unproductive person healthy. Democrats want to extend such care as virtual charity, with reference to "rights." Neither position will do. We have to find a way to value what those who are now deemed unproductive do, and they will have to do something that we wll value.