Animal Spirits

Talk about voodoo economics!  The powers that be are exercising a economic regime based on the writings of Keynes, who had this to say:

"Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits - a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities."[3]

Keynes never ran a business. The motivation is not some deep animal urging to do something, anything, it is a very human process in which one experiences and calculates suffering (passion) uses reason to come up with a solution, and then finds joy in working on the solution.  These are three elements crucial to entrepreneurship, and not a single one can an animal perform.  By Keynesian lights, a german shepherd could run Apple computer.

Animals are limited to perception and reaction.  They can be conditioned to react a certain way if presented a certain perception, and so can people.  But this does not mean people and animals are the same, only that some people can be lowered to animal level in their acts as humans.

For example, from wikipedia:

And in his foreward to the 1936 German language edition of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes wrote: "The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire."

So Keynes recommended his system to Adolf Hitler, in Hitler's drive to reduce humanity to animalism.

The odds on favorite to win the Nobel in economics this year is a professor at Yale, Robert J. Shiller, whose book is entitled

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism

George A. Akerlof (Author), Robert J. Shiller (Author)

We are seeing the ghastly results of reducing humans to animals in a consumeristic society.  Don't buy the book, don't believe the lies the powers that be tell about business.

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