The best quote of the day: John Maynard Keynes on wealth

I’ve never read John Maynard Keynes, even if I can pronounce his name correctly. Didn’t realize he was so radical in his wisdom.

Today, a Times opinion piece by law professor, Paul Campos, writing about how America’s richest universities hoard their money, quotes Keynes.

“The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.”

Campos concludes that Keynes was an optimist. Still, he was right.

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