Submitted by Jeff Berwick via The Dollar Vigilante blog [5],
John Forbes Nash Jr., the Princeton University mathematician who inspired the film “A Beautiful Mind [6],” died on May 23rd in a New Jersey car crash.
While we always look at things critically, and are aware that he had said he was just days away from releasing his discovery of a replacement for Einstein’s relativity theory [7], we’ll leave that private detective work for the millions of truth researchers on the internet.
While researching John Nash, however, we came across numerous anti-Keynesian comments by Nash that caught our eye here at the always anti-Keynesian Dollar Vigilante. Of course, as with most things, his anti-Keynesian stance wasn’t talked about very much and certainly not featured in the movie based on his life.
“Good money,” Nash once argued, is money that is expected to maintain its value over time. “Bad money” is expected to lose value over time, as under conditions of inflation.
This seems to be a consistent economic statement by the late, great mathematician. His economic understanding, and disdain of “Keynesians”, goes deeper. As he stated in this lecture [8]:
The special commodity or medium that we call money has a long and interesting history. And since we are so dependent on our use of it and so much controlled and motivated by the wish to have more of it or not to lose what we have we may become irrational in thinking about it and fail to be able to reason about it like about a technology, such as radio, to be used more or less efficiently.
He goes on to analyze one school of thought’s views on money; namely, Keynesians:
So I wish to present the argument that various interests and groups, notably including “Keynesian” economists, have sold to the public a “quasi-doctrine” which teaches, in effect, that “less is more” or that (in other words) “bad money is better than good money”. Here we can remember the classic ancient economics saying called “Gresham’s law” which was “The bad money drives out the good”. The saying of Gresham’s is mostly of interest here because it illustrates the “old” or “classical” concept of “bad money” and this can be contrasted with more recent attitudes which have been very much influenced by the Keynesians and by the results of their influence on government policies since the 30s
He sees Keynesians as “manipulative.”
So let us define “Keynesian” to be descriptive of a “school of thought” that originated at the time of the devaluations of the pound and the dollar in the early 30’s of the 20th century. Then, more specifically, a “Keynesian” would favor the existence of a “manipulative” state establishment of central bank and treasury which would continuously seek to achieve “economic welfare” objectives with comparatively little regard for the long term reputation of the national currency and the associated effects of that on the reputation of financial enterprises domestic to the state.
He recognizes Keynesians need an ignorant citizenry or “customers of the currency supplied by the state”:
The Keynesians implicitly always have the argument that some good managers can do things of beneficial value, operating with the treasury and the central bank, and that it is not needed or appropriate for the citizenry or the “customers” of the currency supplied by the state to actually understand, while the managers are managing, what exactly they are doing and how it will affect the “pocketbook” circumstances of these customers.
Essentially, as we’ve concluded many times here at TDV Blog, the Keynesians are Communists:
I see this as analogous to how the “Bolshevik communists” were claiming to provide something much better than the “bourgeois democracy” that they could not deny existed in some other countries. But in the end the “dictatorship of the proletariat” seemed to become rather exposed as simply the dictatorship of the regime. So there may be an analogy to this as regards those called “the Keynesians” in that while they have claimed to be operating for high and noble objectives of general welfare what is clearly true is that they have made it easier for governments to “print money”.
Nash was in particularly distrustful [9] of a world currency administered by the current global structures.
He foresaw in the future a sort of world currency being developed, and he had some worries about how one might evolve.
“In practice, I’m a little distrustful of the politicians at the level of the United Nations and elsewhere,” who would be in charge of administering a world currency.
So, Nash, one of the most influential mathematicians of our time, is not fooled by the money manipulators.
Further critiquing the ideology:
…while they have claimed to be operating for high and noble objective of general welfare what is clearly true is that they have made it easier for government to print money.
In conclusion:
And this parallel makes it seem not implausible that a process of political evolution might lead to the expectation on the part of the citizens in the great democracies that they should be better situated to be able to understand whatever will be the monetary polices which, indeed, are typically of great importance to citizens who may have alternative options for where to place their savings.
Some people believe Nash’s contributions [10] to math, economics, and other disciplines helped pave the way for Bitcoin. Some think he is Satoshi Nakamoto [11], the creator of Bitcoin… which makes his death all the more suspicious.
While bad guys like Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller seem to never die it seems that more and more of the good guys, like John Nash tend to pass before their work was done or end up in prison for life, like Ross Ulbricht of the Silk Road.
R.I.P. John and Alicia Nash.
