Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 29, 1993 TAG: 9304290502
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Coleman maligned Keynes as "a hater of businessmen and capitalism." To the contrary, Keynes wrote, "There are valuable human activities which require . . . the environment of private wealth-ownership for their full fruition."
Coleman slandered Keynes "as a demagogic advocate of Marx's exploitation theory." Exactly the opposite. Keynes wrote, "The answer to Marxism is . . . an anti-Marxian socialism . . . based on an unfettering of competition instead of its abolition."
According to your confused letter-writer, Keynes "was a propagandist for labor unions." Rather, Keynes' "General Theory" was a defense of pre-World War II British Trade Unions and their 1926 "general strike" against an across-the-board 20 percent reduction in wages favored by gold-standard monetarists. Keynes' "trade unions wouldn't dream of striking" for "cost of living" adjustments.
Yet Coleman is correct in rejecting economists who refuse to blame much unemployment on "government-protected labor unions" that obtain "wages above market-clearing levels." But that system only got power in America in 1936 when President Roosevelt refused to evict strikers occupying a General Motors plant - after Keynes' 1936 book was published. That is, when Roosevelt abandoned pro-deflationary pro-gold-standard monetary policy, but added a policy of acquiescent acceptance of labor power, there was no more of Keynes' "involuntary unemployment." But unemployment due to selfish labor power slowly developed. JOHN S. PETTENGILL BLACKSBURG
by CNB