Paul Kengor's The Devil and Karl Marx

Paul Kengor's The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration is a stupid and ignorant book. Kengor is particularly keen to chronicle atheist attacks from Marx and communists on religion.

Juvenile Literary Works from Marx

Kengor starts with a poem that Marx wrote when he was 19. Marx envisions himself, I guess, as a ferocious violin player, inspired by the devil. Apparently, Marx was a fan of Goethe. Kengor never uses the phrase 'sturm und drang'. He goes on about some other poems and a play of Marx's. Kengor thinks that Marxists unjustly ignore these early works. They are in the first volume, though, of the Marx-Engels Collected Works.

Some Bits and Pieces from the Lives of Marx and Engels

The second section, after this prelude, is about Marx and Engels. It has little to say about Marx's ideas. He calls Marxism utopian, seeking a heaven on earth. He says nothing about distinction between scientific and utopian socialism.

Kengor, in this part of the book has a lot to say about Marx's life. When discussing his movement among countries, he does not even mention that nations kept on kicking him out. Kengor hops around in chronology. He is big on Marx not earning a living while studying and agitating. Also, Marx had poor bathing habits.

He brings up Bruno Bauer several times. But he does not mention that The Holy Family mocks Bauer. When bringing up Mikhail Bakunin, Kengor does mention the later falling out of Bakunin and Marx. Does Marx's intolerance in splits in the First International have something to do with Lenin's behavior? With Stalin?

Inasmuch as Kengor even discusses Marx's work, he stops at 1848, with the Communist Manifesto. The quotation about religion as the "opiate of the people" is from Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, from 1944. Marx's argument is for changing material conditions so that religion will no longer be needed as "the sigh of the oppressed creature". This idea is not inconsistent with arguments for atheism. Such idealist, superstructural arguments are beside the point, though. The context of this well-known phrase from Marx is over Kengor's head.

Here is all Kengor has to say about Capital:

"Marx had wasted over two decades writing Das Kapital, a long, ridiculous tome, a waste of money as well as time. He had initially received a three hundred dollar advance for the book, but extended over twenty-three years of drawn-out writing, it equated to a little over a dozen dollars a year.

The Bolshevik War on Religion

Kengor does not connect the ideas of Marx to Lenin and events in the Soviet Union. At a more personal level, I do not know that Marx was responsible for what happened to his children after his death, including the suicides of two daughters. I had not known Lenin spoke at Paul Lafarge's funeral. Kengor brings up Bukharin several times, but does not mention that he was a victim of Stalin's show trials. I do not think Engels not getting married to the women that he slept with is on the same moral plane as the tortures in communist prisons in eastern and central Europe.

Excerpts from the House Un-American Activities Committee

I do not know why I should care about testimony in the 1940s and 1950s to the House Unamerican Activities Committee. I was under the impression that a united front and a popular front are different concepts. The former is all non-facist forces, while the latter is all leftist forces. Anyways, Kengor does not discuss this distinction or even why it is a proplem for the Communist Party to work with Christians, and specifically Catholics, for specific reasons. Yes, the Communist Party was atheist. Kengor barely mentions the relationship of Catholics to Franco, and only in the context of what communists say. He only mentions Hitler in the context of turns in the communist party line with the Hitler-Stalin pact and then the German invasion of the Soviet Union. He has nothing to say about how this has anything to do with Marx's ideas. And he doesn't really discuss communist sectarian activities in taking over front groups. I am not surprised that communists were sometimes deceitful.

Various Intellectuals

The fifth part consists of two chapters. Kengor writes a bit about the life of the occulist Aleister Crowley, the New York Times's reporter Walter Duranty (who believed what the Soviets told him in the 1930s), the gay activist Harry Hay, Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, and Kate Millett. Why this selection? Perhaps because snippets of their lives are suitable for ad hominem. Kengor is fairly candid that Crowley does not have much to do with Marxism or communism, for example.

We have another time Kengor says he does not know what he is talking about:

"Trying to discern the inane and impentrable ideas of the men of the Frankfurt School is a soul-crushing exercise in futility. One must spend years scouring pages and footnotes of thick volumes (mostly in untranslated German) trying to arrive at a vague flickering of understanding at what in the devil's name these madmen were thinking about. It would be bad enough if this venture was simple a waste of one's time - especially given the sacrifice of more edifying reading - but what is worse is the strain and toxicity to the intellect and the soul. One is struck again and again at how some Godless intellectuals (especially German ones) can descend into such rank intellectual vacuity, ambiguity, and downright stupidity..."

If I thought Kengor was a person of good-will, I might emphasize here.

Conclusion

The single chapter in the conclusion section neither summarizes the book nor follows from what comes before. We get complaints about Obama's totalitarianism, gay marriage, the Frankfurt school, critical theory, Gramsci, relativism, and cultural Marxism. We also get echos of Fulton Sheen and Pope Pius X's 1907 encyclical on modernism. Apparently, Kengor has never heard of post-modernism. Kengor does not even know what he has covered in the book:

"In this book, we have looked at key figures of the Frankfurt School, including Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, The Sexual Revolution's Wilhelm Reich, and (among others) Herbert Marcuse..."

No, he has not discussed Lukacs or Marcuse, even to the extent of saying something about some moments in their lives.

Some Overall Comments

The book has lots of redundancy. Kengor distinguishes between socialism and communism. I do not see why the book should go through the same quotations from the same papal encyclicals again to see that the Catholic Church opposed both communism and socialism.

The references are odd. For example, if I see a discussion of Darkness at Noon, I expect a reference to Koestler's novel, not a book by a historian. I would hope for more than extracts from Wikipedia and from the "About" section from certain web sites.

It fails at the level of the individual sentence. Consider, "Sheen noted that whereas Karl Marx called religion 'the sigh of the oppressed creature, Sheen saw communism as the sigh of the oppressed creature." Is Sheen noting how Sheen saw communism? At one point, Kengor has Manning Johnson testifying to the HUAC that "this was 'the extension of the hand of friendship and cooperation to the church, while in the other hand holding a dagger to drive through the heart of the church.'" But then, "the outstretched hand concealed a knife." Which metaphor do you want?

Joseph Schumpeter, Neo-Marxist; Walter Lippman, Fabian Socialist

Alfred Marshall, A. C. Pigou, John Neville Keynes, and John Maynard Keynes were also all Fabian socialists. And fascism is a kind of socialism. I learn these interesting facts from Zygmund Dobbs' book, Keynes at Harvard: Economic Deception as a Political Credo. I refer to the 1962 second edition. This book was spewed out by the Veritas Foundation, a reactionary think tank, I guess, associated with a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt.

This book purports to be an examination of how colleges at the time are subverting America by promoting socialism, with a focus on the economics department at Harvard. Strangely enough, no examination of the contents of Keynes' theories or of the teaching at Harvard is included. It is all about motives and extremely loose associations of individuals. For example, socialists wanted to abolish the gold standard; Keynes wanted to abolish the gold standard. Thus, Keynes was promoting socialism. Nothing is said at all about the economic consequences of Winston Churchill. Anything written by any of these 'socialists' is all indoctrination and propaganda and extremism. As is apparently typical of this sort of lunacy, Dobbs provides lots of misrepresentation of his own selection of quotations.

At one point, Dobbs mentions Knut Wicksell's theory of the natural rate of interest. This leads to the following curious footnote:

"The Swedish Socialist Gunnar Myrdal, although an economist, was retained by the Carnegie Foundation to head a research study on the American Negro. This field, which was completely foreign to Myrdal (since he is a Socialist economist and there certainly is no Negro problem in Sweden), was entrusted to him because of his left-wing bias and not because of his anthropological qualifications. Among those who worked in compiling the report was James E. Jackson, Negro member of the national committee of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. and recent keynote speaker before the Russian Communist Congress in Moscow. Another researcher was Ralph J. Bunche, who at that time was well known as a follower of the Communist line and was a contributing editor of the Communist magazine Science & Society. The results of this Carnegie study were published as An American Dilemma. Amazingly enough An American Dilemma was used as the main prop by the United States Supreme Court in its decisions on the Negro question. The decisions were applauded by the Keynesians and Communists in Washington and elsewhere. The fact that Felix Frankfurter has been an enthusiastic Keynesian supporter for many years and was a national officer of the N.A.A.C.P. did not prevent him from leading the Supreme Court in these decisions. Mention of the Carnegie grant brings to mind the fact that Frankfurter's protégé in Harvard, Alger Hiss, had at one time been president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace." (p. 76)

You will not learn from Dobbs about mental gyrations white Americans go through after they tell you that America is the land of opportunity - anyone can succeed. And then how do you explain these Black Americans who do not seem to have the same opportunities? The substance of anything being discussed is not at issue. Nor does it matter whether anything these authors say is true or false.

Here is an example of Dobbs being unable to read and of writing nonsense:

"Norman Thomas, titular head of the Socialist Party, declared: 'Keynes has had great influence and his work is especially important in any reappraisal of socialist theory. He represents a decisive break with laissez-faire capitalism.' Norman Thomas' old associates of the League for Industrial Democracy, Alvin Hansen and Seymour E. Harris (both professors of economics at Harvard) have become the chief spokesmen for Keynesian economics in the United States. As usual, Harvard has carried the ball for extremists." (p. 79)

Many on the left had all sorts of opinions of about Keynes, from agreement to dismissing him as the latest bourgeois economist. Obviously, the Great Depression was a problem. Keynes had a large impact on the world, including, arguably, on the development of the United States economy from towards the end of the Great Depression. Thomas says that socialists must consider that impact. He is not saying, at least here, that he agrees or disagrees with Keynes. And Norman Thomas was hardly the most extreme one could find at the time.

By the way, throughout Dobbs cannot imagining professors assigning texts that are historically important for consideration. If a student is assigned the reading of The Communist Manifesto, it must be brainwashing into communism.

Here is another example of anti-intellectualism:

"Curiously the authorities used by [Stuart] Chase in his book the Economy of Abundance (1934) were G. D. H. Cole, J. A. Hobson, Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, J. M. Keynes, John Strachey and H. G. Wells, all spawned by the British Fabian Society. American sources used were Charles A. Beard, Adolph Berle, Harry W. Laider, George Soule, Rexford Guy Tugwell and Thorstein Veblen, all Fabians of the home grown variety." (p. 85)

As usual, we learn nothing about what Chase gets out of these authorities or whether they were right, wong, or at least worth thinking about on some topic or other. Other 'Fabian socialists' include Felix Frankfurter and Harry F. Ward. I suppose Dobbs is right to be worried about Harry Dexter White. I might read more about Harold Laski or John Strachey, the latter being Lytton's cousin.

Dobbs takes Henry Hazlitt as an expert on Keynes. I list other works Dobbs recommends below. I concentrate on work of the time that was probably ill-reasoned nonsense, not the memoirs of 'socialists' that might be of interest. The Martin book was not referenced, since it was published later, but definitely belongs in this list.

Michael Holroyd published his biography of Lytton Strachey between the two editions of Dobbs' pamphlet. So Dobbs learned about Bloomsbury and their interlocking sexual interactions. With his ability to keep to the point, Dobbs goes off in a new chapter about Engels living out of wedlock and provides an overview of Havelock Ellis.

You will not learn what arguments are in Keynes' writing from Dobbs' pamphlet. Nor will you see any examination of how the contents of Keynes' theory might have differed from what was taught at Harvard in any period. Apparently, 'Fabian socialism' was the 'critical theory' of Dobbs' day. It is an excuse for ignorant reactionaries of bad will to drivel on.

References

• Archibald Roosevelt and Zygmund Dobbs, The Great Deceit - Social Pseudo-Sciences (1964)
• James Burnham, The Web of Subversion (1954)
• Zygmund Dobbs, Keynes at Harvard: Economic Deception as a Political Credo second edition (1962).
• John T. Flynn, The Road Ahead: America's Creeping Revolution (1949)
• Sister M. Margaret Patrica McCarren, Ph.D., Fabianism in the Political Life of Britain, 1919-1931, Heritage Foundation (1954)
• Rose Martin, Fabian Freeway: High Road to Socialism in the USA (1966).
• R. W. Whitney, Reds in America (1924)

Mark Levin's American Marxism: Worse Than Worthless

Authortarians in the United States are currently competing to see who can publish the most stupid book. Mark Levin is a strong contender. Much more drivel exists in the book under review in this post than described here.

Levin goes on about selected philosophers in odd ways. I haven't seen others point out his curious grouping of Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx. They supposedly "argue for the individual's subjugation into a general will, or greater good, or bigger cause built on radical egalitarianism - that is, 'the collective good'" (p. 18). He has the usual misassignment of utopian schemes to Marx. I do not claim to understand Hegel, but I do not see why holding up the Prussia of his day is a matter of advocating egalitarianism.

The 1619 Project, created by Nikole Hannah-Jones, was originally published in the New York Times. Levin insults his readers by suggesting that the naivety of Walter Duranty, the Times Moscow bureau chief from 1922 to 1936, and Herbert Matthews 1950s' scoop interview with Fidel Castro are relevant to the validity of the 1619 project (pp. 110-111). This fallacy is called poisoning the well. But what does the 1619 project have to do with Karl Marx?

Levin is big on arguing strawpersons. He tells us that Marx does not appreciate the industrial revolution and "the technological and other advances" with which "capitalism has created unimaginable and unparalleled wealth for more people in all walks of life than any other economic system" (p. 4). "Longer workdays do not ensure wealth creation or growth" (p. 4). Levin is probably incapable of reading volume 1 of Capital or even noting the existence of part IV, on the production of relative surplus value. Finally, in arguing against supposed Marxist environmentalists, who critize Marx for emphasizing economic growth, he manages to quote (p. 157) Marx's praise for the bourgeois from The Communist Manifesto near where Marx writes "All that is solid melts into air."

Despite the above, Levin has very little to say about Marxism. Some of his rants are quite curious. A 1909 book by Herbert Croly, an author associated with the founding of The New Republic, provokes a numbe of pages (pp. 45-48). He is curiously obsessed with John Dewey's impact (p. 54 and p. 204) on education. Levin goes on about (pp. 32-39) a 1966 essay in the Nation, by Francis Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. I happen to recognize Piven and Cloward, but what this has to do with Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Critical Race Theory, or whatever else is unexplained.

Levin quotes Ayn Rand (pp. 153-158) and George Reisman as 'experts' when denying global warming. But let me turn from inappropriate arguments from authority back to strawpersoning. As others have noted, much of this book is long chunks of quotations from others. Sometimes he even manages to find somebody on his side who is worth studying. (I would not cite Hayek's The Fatal Conceit too much myself, given disputes about its authorship.) So he has many long passages from various academics. Although these passages are often long-winded academic prose with many polysyllabic passages, they are usually quite reasonable. Levin will then have a short passage supposedly saying what they say in other words. Rarely does his rephrasing have much basis in the quoted text. Sometimes it is a complete non sequitur.

But maybe Levin is just illiterate and can neither say what he means nor mean what he says.

"American Marxism exists, it is here and now, and indeed it is pervasive, and its multitude of hybrid but often interlocking movements are actively working to destroy our society and culture, and overthrow the country as we know it. Many of the individuals and groups who collectively make up this movement are unknown to most Americans, or operate in ways in which most Americans are unaware. Thus, this book is written to introduce you to a representative sample of them, some perhaps, more familiar than others, and to provide you with specific examples of their writings, ideas, and activities, so you can know of them and hear from them." (p. 12)

So he claims he is presenting a "representative sample of them", thus the strawpersons. This is supposedly a representative sample of "the individuals and groups who collectively make up this movement", where "the movement" is a "multitude of hybrid but often interlocking movements". Presumably, he took some care over this circular, vague, non-definition.

Here he says Critical Theory started in American universities in 1989:

"Indeed, in 1989, ... the seeds of a radical-fringe ideology, Critical Theory, which I discuss at length ..., and the unraveling of the existing society by weaponizing the culture against itself, began their early bloom throughout the American landscape, but with little public notice." (pp. 43-44)

Others have noted that Levin cannot even get his Nazi conspiracy theories right. As near as I can parse this non-sentence, Levin here says that higher education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are highly relevant for the degrowth movement (that is, the belief in their irrelevancy is expendable):

"Inasmuch as the purpose of this movement is to regress back to nature and a mere subsistence economy, where the communal psyche is anti-growth, anti-technology, anti-science, and anti-modernity, ironically the irrelevancy of higher education, graduate studies, and doctoral degrees, and the colleges and faculties themselves, particulary in the teaching of hard sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics, are expendable." (p. 158)

This book fails at the level of the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, and overall. It has no index.

Ignorance, incoherency, disdain for his reader - on which criteria is Levin the greatest?

Red-Baiting Keynesian Textbooks

What economists know now is influenced by what they could teach in the past. Perhaps where we are now has something do with interventions in the past from outside of academic economics. I think, for example, of the suppression of Lorie Tarshis' full-throated Keynesianism.

Lorie Tarshis was a Canadian who attended Cambridge while Keynes was working out the General Theory. He attended Keynes' annual lectures from 1932 to 1935. With others, he brought Keynes' economics to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tarshis was at Tufts. He later wrote the first introductory textbook to incorporate Keynesianism. I gather this textbook, Elements of Economics (Houghton Mifflin, 1947) predates Samuelson's textbook. Let's look at a reaction to the use of this textbook in teaching the introduction to economics at Yale:

"Marx himself, in the course of his lifetime, envisaged two broad lines of action that could be adopted to destroy the bourgeoisie: one was violent revolution; the other, a slow increase of state power, through extended social services, taxation, and regulation, to a point where a smooth transition could be effected from an individualist to a collectivist society. The Communists have come to scorn the latter method, but it is nevertheless evident that the prescience of their most systematic and inspiring philosopher has not been thereby vitiated.

It is a revolution of the second type, one that advocates a slow but relentless transfer of power from the individual to the state, that has roots in the Department of Economics at Yale, and unquestionably in similar departments in many colleges throughout the country. The documentation that follows should paint a vivid picture." -- William F. Buckley, Jr. God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom, Henry Regery, 1951, p. 46-47

Buckley applies his ideologically-charged nonsense to textbooks by Tarshis, Samuelson, and a few others.

Can One Respect Henry Hazlitt?

I describe Henry Hazlitt as an author whose work goes well beyond ignorance and as somebody who does not know what he is talking about. Let me give an example. Here's Keynes giving us the theory he wants to attack:

"The classical theory of employment - supposedly simple and obvious - has been based, I think, on two fundamental postulates, though practically without discussion, namely: I. The wage is equal to the marginal product of labour That is to say, the wage of an employed person is equal to the value which would be lost if employment were to be reduced by one unit (after deducting any other costs which this reduction of output would avoid); subject to the qualification that the equality may be disturbed in accordance with certain principles, if competition and markets are imperfect. II. The utility of the wage when a given volume of labour is employed is equal to the marginal disutility of that amount of employment. That is to say, the real wage of an employed person is that which is just sufficient (in the estimation of the employed persons themselves) to induce the volume of labour actually employed to be forthcoming; subject to the qualification that the equality for each individual unit of labour may be disturbed by combination between employable units analogous to the imperfections of competition which qualify the first postulate. Disutility must be here understood to cover every kind of reason which might lead a man, or a body of men, to withhold their labour rather than accecpt a wage which has to them a utility below a certain minimum... ...Subject to these qualifications, the volume of employed resources is duly determined, according to the classical theory, by the two postulates. The first gives us the demand schedule for employment, the second gives us the supply schedule; and the amount of employment is fixed at the point where the utility of the marginal product balances the disutility of the marginal employment." -- J. M. Keynes (1936). The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money

Here's Hazlitt, with my interjections, revealing an ignorance of the theory he wants to defend:

"'The classical theory of employment - supposedly simple and obvious - has been based,' Keynes thinks, 'on two fundamental postulates, though practically without discussion' (p. 5). The first of these is 'I. The wage is equal to the marginal product of labor.' (His italics, p. 5) This postulate is correctly and clearly stated. It is not, of course, part of the classical theory of employment. That adjective should be reserved, in accordance with custom and in the interests of precision, for theory prior to the subjective-value or 'marginalist' revolution of Jevons and Menger.”

Hazlitt is correct (and unoriginal) in asserting that Keynes’ usage of “classical” is confusing.

”But the postulate has become part of 'orthodox' theory since its formulation by the 'Austrian' school and, particularly in America, by John Bates Clark. Having written this simple postulate, Keynes adds eight lines of 'explanation' which are amazingly awkward and involved and do more to obfuscate than to clarify.”

Let me put aside arguments about who originated the theory of marginal productivity. Keynes’ qualitifications are obviously getting at imperfections of competition. For example, if the firm is a monopolist in the product market, the wage, when the firm is in equilibrium, is equal to the marginal value product of labor, not the value of the marginal product of labor. Because Hazlitt is incompetent, he finds Keynes’ qualifications “awkward”.

”He then proceeds to state the second alleged 'fundamental postulate' of the 'classical theory of employment,' to wit: ‘II. The utility of the wage when a given volume of labor is employed is equal to the marginal disutility of that amount of employment.' (His italics, p. 5.) He adds, as part of his explanation: 'Disutility must be here understood to cover every kind of reason which might lead a man, or a body of men, to withhold their labor rather than accept a wage which had to them a utility below a certain minimum' (p. 6). 'Disutility' is here so broadly defined as to be almost meaningless. It may be seriously doubted, in fact, whether this whole second 'fundamental postulate,' as Keynes frames and explains it, is or ever was a necessary part of the 'classical' or traditional theory of employment. Keynes does name and (later) quote A. C. Pigou as one whose theories rested on it. Yet it may be seriously questioned whether this 'second postulate' is representative of any substantial body of thought, particularly in the complicated form that Keynes states it.”

Keynes is here describing the neoclassical theory of the worker trading off leisure with the consumption he can purchase with his wages. Figure 1, which formulates the theory in terms of the utility of leisure, rather than the disutility of labor, may remind you of the textbook theory. Once again, Hazlitt’s ignorance of varieties of this theory reveals nothing more than his incompetence.

Figure 1: Equilibrium Of The Utility-Maximizing Worker

”The 'orthodox' marginal theory of wages and employment is simple. It is that wage-rates are determined by the marginal productivity of workers; that when employment is 'full' wage-rates are equal to the marginal productivity of all those seeking work and able to work; but that there will be unemployment whenever wage-rates exceed this marginal productivity.”

Note that here Hazlitt describes the marginal productivity of labor as being “determined” for a specific volume of labor, the “full” employment level. When the level of employment of labor is less than “full”, the wage can still be equal to the marginal productivity of workers, as calculated for that lower level of employment. Obviously, then, the equality of the wage and the marginal productivity of labor is not enough to determine either wages or employment. Some other relationship must be put forward, in neoclassical theory, to help determine these quantities. That is where the theory of the supply of labor, summarized in the figure, comes in.

“Wage-rates may exceed this marginal productivity either through an increase in union demands or through a drop in this marginal productivity. (The latter may be caused either by less efficient work, or by a drop in the price of, or demand for, the products that workers are helping to produce.) That is all there is to the theory in its broadest outlines. The 'second postulate,' in the form stated by Keynes, is unnecessary and unilluminating.”

I have shown the role the second postulate fills in neoclassical theory. Hazlitt, being incompentent, isn’t able to even count variables and equations.

”Subject to certain qualifications, Keynes contends, 'the volume of employed resources is duly determined, according to the classical theory, by the two postulates [which Keynes has named]. The first gives us the demand schedule for employment; the second gives us the the supply schedule; and the amount of employment is fixed at the point where the utility of the marginal product balances the disutility of the marginal employment' (p. 6). Is this indeed the 'classical' theory of employment? The first postulate - that 'the wage is equal to the marginal product of labor' - does not merely give us the 'demand schedule' for labor; it tells us the point of intersection of both the 'demand schedule' and the 'supply schedule.' The demand schedule for workers is the wage-rate that employers are willing to offer for workers.”

In neoclassical theory, this schedule “is the wage-rate that employers are willing to offer workers” at each level of employment within the possible range of levels. The ‘first postulate’ can, at best, determine the schedule, but not the location at which the labor market is in equilibrium.

”The 'supply schedule' of workers is fixed by the wage-rate that workers are willing to take. This is not determined, for the individual worker, by the 'disutility' of the employment - at least not if 'disutility' is used in its common-sense meaning. Many an individual unemployed worker would be more than willing to take a job at a rate below a given union scale if the union members would let him, or if the union leader would consent to reduce the scale." -- Henry Hazlitt, The Failure of the "New Economics": An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies, D. Van Nostrand Company, 1959.

Hazlitt just does not understand the theory he wants to defend. As far as I am concerned, Hazlitt’s entire book attacking Keynes is as incompetent as the above. It might take me some time to further document this claim, if anybody wants me to, since my local library has apparently disposed of the above quoted book. (I copied from an old Usenet post of mine to create this post.)