Mick Jagger's Favorite Economist

I suppose you could be right, but it’s all a matter of perspective, it seems.  Following is a compendium of quotes from famous economists and others who claim otherwise:

In 1945, economist David McCord Wright noted that a conservative political candidate could easily run a campaign “largely on quotations from The General Theory.” The following year, economist Gottfried Haberler, of the conservative Austrian school, conceded that the specific policy recommendations of Keynesian economics were not at all revolutionary. “They are in fact very conservative,” he admitted.

Peter Drucker, a conservative admirer of Keynes, viewed him as not merely conservative, but ultraconservative. “He had two basic motivations,” Drucker explained in a 1991 interview with Forbes. “One was to destroy the labor unions and the other was to maintain the free market. Keynes despised the American Keynesians. His whole idea was to have an impotent government that would do nothing but, through tax and spending policies, maintain the equilibrium of the free market. Keynes was the real father of neoconservatism, far more than [economist F.A.] Hayek!”

John Kenneth Galbraith, whose politics were well to the left of Keynes, not to mention Drucker, agreed with this assessment. “The broad thrust of his efforts, like that of Roosevelt, was conservative; it was to endure that the system would survive,” he wrote. But, Galbraith added, “Such conservatism in the English-speaking countries does not appeal to the truly committed conservative.”

It was obvious to those on the political left and in the Soviet Union that Keynes was one of socialism’s greatest enemies, even if some on the right still view Keynes as a crypto-communist. State socialism, he said, “is, in fact, little better than a dusty survival of a plan to meet the problems of 50 years ago, based on a misunderstanding of what someone said a hundred years ago.” Indeed, Keynes told playwright George Bernard Shaw that the whole point of The General Theory was to knock away the Ricardian foundations of Marxism.

One of Keynes’ students, Arthur Plumptre, explained Keynes’ philosophy this way. In his view, Hayek’s “road to serfdom” could as easily come from a lack of government as from too much. If high unemployment was allowed to continue for too long, Keynes thought the inevitable result would be socialism–total government control–and the destruction of political freedom. This highly undesirable result had to be resisted and could only be held at bay if rigid adherence to laissez-faire gave way, but not too much. As Plumptre put it, Keynes “tried to devise the minimum government controls that would allow free enterprise to work.”

Incidentally, in his 1972 interview with Dick Cavett, Jagger said that the LSE  had “bribed” him and told him he was going to become a Keynesian (@~ 10:40):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeD96h4cOd0