Keynes the Jokester?

I spent much of my recent vacation reading Henry Hazlitt's chapter-by-chapter demolition of Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), The Failure of the"New Economics" (1959). I didn't expect to read the book cover to cover, but after only a few pages I had to keep going. It is that well-written and interesting. I'm now a few pages from the end.

The more I read the more I thought: Keynes was surely joking. No one in his position could really be that confused, contradictory, and ignorant of economic logic. It had to be a gag on the economics profession, an emperor-with-no-clothes experiment.

Thus I smiled when I got to Hazlitt's statement in chapter XXV,"Did Keynes Recant?" (p. 398):

Keynes was a brilliant man. Much of what he wrote he wrote in tongue-in-cheek, for the pleasure of paradox, to épater le bourgois [shock the middle class], in the spirit of Wilde, Shaw, and the Bloomsbury circle. Perhaps the whole of the General Theory was intended as a huge (400-page) joke, and Keynes was appalled to find disciples who took it all literally.

If it was a joke, Keynes helped inflict much misery and oppression on innocent people just for a laugh. I guess for the elitist Keynes, the well-being of the masses can't be allowed to impede his bold and daring lifestyle. It is for people like him that secularists like me wish there was a place of fire and brimstone.

At any rate, I highly recommend Hazlitt's book. Don Boudreaux says that Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker proves that any subject, no matter how complex, can be written about clearly and accessibly. I say the same about The Failure of the"New Economics."

Cross-posted at Anything Peaceful and Free Association.