By Mike Duncan Copyright 2017

Public Affairs Hachette Book Group, ISBN 978-1-61039-721 (Hardcover)

            Just as many current historians now view the geo-political results of WWI as seeding WWII, Mr. Duncan, a popular history podcaster (“The History of Rome”), illustrates how the Roman “social” civil wars between 130 and 79 BC sowed the ground for the “caesarian” civil wars of 44 to 27 BC which resulted in the end of the Roman Republic and the creation of the Roman Empire.

            This book is obviously intended to answer Mr. Duncan’s podcast participants most pressing, and frequent, questions:  “While producing The History of Rome I was asked the same questions over and over again. Is America Rome? Is the United States following a similar historical trajectory? If so where does the US stand on the Roman timeline?”

            We can say “obviously” because Mr. Duncan’s book is replete with historical parallels between the decline of the Roman Republic and what we have witnessed here in the United States since at least the 1980s:

                          Two parties—in the Roman republic the Plebians who controlled the popularly elected Roman Assembly and the Optimates who controlled the Roman aristocratic Senate—constantly using whatever legal means, and sometimes illegal means—to repeal or block the other parties legislation resulting in an accumulation of grave socio-economic problems that are never resolved—particularly the constantly increasing gross inequality in the distribution of the wealth accumulated by the Roman Republic between plebs and optimates:

                        The afore mentioned gridlock over decades “provoking populare demagogues” who surrounded themselves with armed “gangs” of supporters ostensibly “for protection” but routinely used for intimidation of opponents;

                        The aforementioned gridlock resulting in the Roman executive  branch—the Consuls—ruling by decree—i.e. the Roman republic equivalent of “executive orders; “

                        Mob assaults on Senators and Assemblymen—including in the Forum and Senate and Assembly chambers;

                        Gerrymandering of the Assembly (organized like an electoral college in which each geographically and ethnically defined “tribe” cast its vote in the Assembly as a unit, each tribe with one vote) by manipulating who qualified to be a member of each tribe:

                        Continuous engagement in “foreign wars”—particularly in Roman “Asia” (our Near East) and the Middle East which constantly drained the Republics financial resources and attention from addressing its socio-economic problems;

                        Only the wealthiest Romans (or those willing to accumulate massive debt) held public office as over time campaigns for office became more fierce at all levels and consequently more expensive;

                        In the final decades of the Republic roman politics being dominated by powerful families whose members over decades held or competed for high office—e.g. the families of The Marius’s, The Gracchi, The Pompeans, The Scipios, the Sullans, etc.

            Sound “all too familiar?”

            And just as scary as all of the aforementioned historical parallels between the last decades of the Roman Republic and recent decades in American politics is Mr. Duncan’s answer “where does the US stand on the roman timeline”—especially since at this time 85% of our nation’s wealth is owned by just 20% of its population?

            The answer is the Roman “social civil wars” commencing around 130 BC occurred at just about the 250 year mark of second roman republic (counting from 390 BC when the first republic was reconstituted after the Gauls sacked Rome.)

            And what year is 2023 since the founding of the United States republic in 1788?  235.

            A common current trope now—particularly among audiobook historians—is that history cannot actually repeat itself because time is like a flowing river in which one can never step into the same water.

            But as we all know a river also cuts a permanent “bed” and pathway through the land over which the river flows.  And humans in general, and American politicians in particular, can, and do, step into the same spot in the river bed of time with profoundly disappointing frequency,

By Philip Short

2022 Henry Holt and Company

ISBN 978 162 779 3667

              Of all the biographical and semi-biographical articles and books I have read about Vladimir Putin,  Mr. Short’s  (who also wrote what is considered by many reviewers the definitive one volume bio of Mao (Mao: A Life)) Putin stands out for several reasons.

              First it is painstakingly non-judgmental and researched (over 130 pages of end-footnotes, in fine print).  And a good deal of the book is devoted to sifting through all the various “stories” and “allegations” surrounding what Mr. Putin knew, or did not know, about various assassinations, “terrorist” incidents, a downed civilian airliner and the slow and steady deterioration in US-Russian government relations during Mr. Putin’s presidency (and how much of that deterioration was attributable to short sited, self centered US foreign policy.)

              Second it is actually enlightening for a novice such as myself on the mysteries of the workings of Russian government.  For example, he explains how the Russian Presidency was deliberately written to be a much more powerful executive branch than the American one and consequently supports, not just enables, authoritarian rule.  (Which I suppose should not surprise us as that is the only type of government Russia has had—regardless of its name brand—since the 1600s.)

              Third, Mr. Short also picks through all the fact versus fiction (to the best we are able to given the available sources) about Mr. Putin’s road to the Russian white house.  For example the major influence of Mr. Putin’s training and service in the KGB, most importantly in East Germany, was neither related to spy craft or interrogation techniques—but learning how to get things done in a bureaucracy as labyrinthine as any in history.

              Similarly from this book’s perspective,  Mr. Putin’s professional education in making things happen in a Bleak House bureaucracy was fine tuned while he served as in effect “chief of staff” for various St Petersburg-Leningrad government administrators—including its mayors, who under the Russian constitution at that time, had the same authority as the President of Russia concerning the entire area under his/her jurisdiction, which in Leningrad’s case, was considerable). 

              The traits the book details Mr. Putin demonstrated he learned to master both during his years with the KGB and in St. Petersburg were: staying in the background and out of the public eye; studious and lengthy analysis of all the players and issues that would be involved in implementing any decision or policy before doing so: and making himself indispensable in the “getting things done department” to each one of his superiors—in both the KGB and in the civic government.

              These skills served him so well that when it came time for Mr. Yeltsin to leave office he appointed Mr. Putin as his successor. And  as an illustration of just how very low a profile Mr. Putin had so successfully maintained his selection surprised virtually everyone in the preseidential sweep stakes at that time.   Mr. Short’s book also leaves one with the impression that the Chinese maxim—that if you leave the city and sit quietly by the river, soon you will start seeing the heads of your competition floating by—clearly applied in Mr. Putin’s ascendancy to the Russian Presidency.

              Mr. Short also documents how Mr. Putin’s governing skills and own campaign “To Make Russia Great Again” and “respected” (by The World) have made him consistently popular—especially outside the cities—with the Russian people throughout his tenure in office.

              This brings us to the only “disappointment” this reader suffered after completing the book.  After so meticulously categorizing how Mr. Putin came to power and how he has remained in office for so long with popular support—we expect to finally get a cogent explanation of why such a previously cautious and studious man could launch a so far disastrous  invasion of the Ukraine (from the stand point failing to militarily install a puppet government in the Ukraine to ensure Russian sovereignty over the East and Southern Ukraine and prevent NATO expansion there).

              However when we get to this point in the story of Putin—we get only a couple of pages with the following summation text and which one could say is clearly one of the central themes of this biography:

“The decision to invade, far from being aberrant, was consistent with the way he had acted before. Throughout Putin’s time in office, whenever he was faced with what he saw as an existential choice between antagonizing the West and preserving his own power and Russia’s position in the world, the latter always prevailed.  In 2003 he had ordered the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky because nipping in the bud of the political ambitions of the business elite was more important than the loss of Western investment.  In 2014, he occupied Crimea and backed the creation of rump protectorates in Donetsk and Luhansk because safeguarding the Black Sea Fleet’s base at Sevastopol and keeping Ukraine out of NATO were more important than Western sanctions. In each case, Putin accepted the economic damage to Russia as a price that had to be paid. In 2022, the invasion of Ukraine followed the same pattern.”

              A couple of pages later Mr. Short writes:

“Putin’s biggest mistake was his refusal to accept that Ukrainians and Russians…are not one people but distinct slav nations, each of which cleaves to its own national identity. His second, scarcely less serious, miscalculation was to overestimate the capabilities of his armed forces.”

              Okay but why, after a life time of deliberative, cautious decision making did Mr. Putin throw away his successful “play book” to make such poor decisions?  (After all, He already knew all about the failings of the Russian military during their first incursion into Eastern Ukraine and Crimea.)  Working in an authoritarian office for so long? Hubris? Personal grudge/dislike of Mr. Zelensky (according to many reporters generally not an easy man to get along with.)  At least this reader gets the impression Mr. Short also has no idea.

              But that “disappointment” (and not at all a criticism) aside, this book is well worth anyone’s time who wants to know what makes Mr. Putin tick.  Of all the works on Mr. Putin prior to Mr. Short’s that his reviewer has read, no biographer has gotten closer to the “real” Putin.

GREED, LIES AND THE POISONING OF AMERICA

Gerald Posner

2020 Avid Reader Press,  ISBN 978-1-5011-5189-7

            If anyone wants to know why prescription drugs in America cost on average twice as much as the same drugs do in Europe,  Mr. Posner explains it well in Pharma using as a thread a history of the Sackler Family--founders of a small Pharma Empire centered in Purdue Pharmaceuticals. 

Meticulously footnoted and engrossing (as all of Mr. Posner’s books are) the primary source of his findings is the voluminous discovery resulting from decades of state and federal litigation against pharmaceutical companies including Purdue—a mass marketer and seller of OxyCodin.

            According to Pharma, the three primary contributors to the highest average drug prices in the world are: (1) non-regulation of drug prices, (2) special federal legislation and regulation favoring Pharma (or the absence or insufficiency of such—e.g. the FDA has only 39 employees to review the veracity of 35,000 drug ads per year); and (3) the unregulated “middlemen” of American drug sales and distribution: Pharmacy Benefit Managers.

            The U.S. is the only one of the industrialized nations that permit drug manufacturers and distributors to set their own prices for their drug products without any price caps or indirect price controls.   This, Mr. Posner points out, in conjunction with the legislative price monopolies, results in a manufacturer of the EpiPen charging $608 for one in the U.S. and $100-150 in Europe (and its CEO being unapologetic to Congress for doing so.)

            And not only has Congress left Pharma free to set their own prices, through patent laws and special legislation, they have also given Pharma price monopoly.

            Mr. Posner points out that only 27 of 77 countries even allow any drug to be patented, and those that do grant drug patents do so for much shorter periods (5-7 years) than the U.S. (up to 17 to 20 years).  Switzerland and Germany Mr. Posner notes do not permit drugs to be patented at all—only the process of manufacturing them.

            Congress has also afforded Pharma monopoly pricing through special legislation.

            One of those special legislative acts Mr. Posner discusses at length in Pharma is the Orphan Drug Act “ODA”)—designed to encourage Pharma to do R&D and manufacture drugs for rare diseases that “market capitalism” does not offer the financial incentives to research and manufacture.  This includes an exclusive right by the patent holder to set prices for “orphan drugs” for seven years.

            The result is that Pharma has used the ODA to price any new “orphan” drug regardless of the cost of manufacturing that drug.  One example cited by Mr. Posner is Truvada, an anti-viral developed to fight AIDS under the ODA, which in 2000 cost its manufacturer Gilead $6.00 to manufacture a monthly dose; but for which Gilead charged $1,600-2000 dollars for—a 25,000% mark up.

            Mr. Posner also explains how the the third primary contributor to the world’s highest drug prices are Pharmacy Benefit Managers (“PBMs”).

            Originally PBMs were created as small “niche” companies to permit insurers to outsource and centralize the processing and paying insurance drug benefit claims presumably to lower the overall price of U.S. drugs.

            But Pharma executives and shareholders quickly saw the additional profit making potential of owning and controlling “these drug middlemen. Beginning in 2000 Pharma and Pharma owners and executives (such as the Sacklers) either created new or purchased and expanded existing PBMs until by 2019 over 95% of America’s insurable beneficiaries would have their drug benefits processed by PBMs (about 250 million Americans).

            And by 2019 PBMs not only billed for almost all of the prescriptions filled for insurance beneficiaries, they also determine how much is paid to the pharmacy that supplies them to the beneficiary--consequently controlling the “spread” between the price charged the patient and insurance company and the amount actually paid to the pharmacy.

            The ultimate result—the PBMs originally intended to reduce the price of drugs now are a major contributor to the overall high price of drugs for Americans.

An example cited by Mr. Posner is a Bloomberg Study conducted in 2017 that revealed that PBMs kept 1.3 Billion Dollars out of the 4.2 Billion that Medicaid paid for drugs sold to Medicaid beneficiaries.

            Overall Mr. Posner estimates that PBMs alone increase the price of the average drug sold in the U.S. by at least 30%.  (The nation’s largest PBM, Express Scripts, increased its “spread” of drug sales profits over a five year period from $3.87 per drug sale processed to $5.16.)

            And, again thanks to Congress, PBMs are under no federal regulation or even oversight.

            Mr. Posner concludes that the cumulative effect of non-regulation of drug prices, federal patent and special legislation and PBMs resulted in an increase in brand name drugs over a five year period of 127% while the inflation rate for the same period for common household goods was 11%.

            “The Lies” of Pharma also take up a good portion of Mr. Posner’s book such as Pharma funding and/or subsidizing the same “consumer agencies” that promoted the safety and pricing of their products.  (In one of many examples, in  2012 Mr. Posner notes that the Senate Finance Committee discovered that “The American Pain Foundation” received 90% of its funding from Pharma.)

                        Perhaps the biggest “Lie” pedaled by Pharma is that their R&D costs are so much higher than drug manufacturers face in Europe.

            Nonsense points out Mr. Posner.  Much of new drug research is actually funded by the federal government in the form of research grants and special legislation.  For example, by using the grants and tax credits afforded by the ODA, up to 70% of a new orphan drug’s R&D is paid for by the government.

            While Mr. Posner’s emphasis on the need for vastly more government regulation and oversight of Pharma is a sensible start, the definitive solution is obviously major federal campaign finance reform.

            Only when corporations and “PACs” are prohibited from contributing to federal election campaigns and federal campaign contributions are restricted to  individuals and capped will Congress be free to legislate only in the public interest, and Americans finally be free of the greed and lies of Pharma.

Modern Monetary Theory and The Birth Of The People’s Economy

STEPHANIE KELTON

2020 PublicAffairs New York  ISBN 978-1-5417-3618-4

            Modern Monetary Theory (“MMT”) is macroeconomic theory primarily aimed at addressing the most common opposition to significant increases social program spending:  the annual federal fiscal deficit (3.1 trillion and 15% of GDP in 2020).

            In the initial chapters of her book Ms. Kelton attempts to dispel the most common “deficit myths” such as government borrowing diminishes the amount of money available for private lending. (In her government vs private sector “buckets” of money analogy, government borrowing to cover insufficient federal revenues can actually stimulate private investment because deficit spending puts more money into the private sector bucket.)

            However the main theme of Ms. Kelton’s book is that Congress does not have to worry about any social program spending creating fiscal deficits (including Social Security and Medicare) as long as deficit spending does not cause inflation (which degrades primarily the wealth of the 20% of “low income” and 60% of “middle class” Americans because 80% of the nation’s wealth is now owned by the 20% of Americans in the top fifth income percentile).

            According to Miss Kelton non-inflationary deficit spending should not be worrisome and can actually be beneficial to the national economy for two reasons.

            First, the federal government is a “sovereign currency issuer” and consequently has sole authority to establish the legal value of US currency (as opposed to nations such as common market countries whose currency value is wholly or partially determined by factors out of its control—e.g. the countries using the Euro as its national currency). 

            Therefore, as Ms. Kelton frequently likes to say throughout her book, the federal government does not have to budget like a household.  A household cannot print its own sovereign—i.e. universally accepted—currency to pay its “bills” but the federal government can issue as much currency as it needs to do so (again as long as it does not cause inflation.)

            Ms. Kelton further explains that non-inflationary deficit can be beneficial using a “bucket analogy”.  Whatever fiscal deficit there may be in the federal bucket between federal spending and revenues is a fiscal surplus in the private sector bucket.  In other words, federal deficit spending (at least on social programs and infrastructure) just does not disappear into thin air, but permits producers and consumers in the private sector to sell and buy products and services consumers want or need utilizing the cash infused by deficit spending.

            Consequently under Ms. Kelton’s version of MMT there is no reason the government cannot fund either necessary/desired infrastructure repairs and improvements or adequately fund Social Security and Medicare or provide for a federal job guarantee accessible to any American worker displaced by an economic or natural catastrophy.

            MMT is simplistically attractive and Ms. Kelton is adept at discussing complex appearing macroeconomic issues at a layman’s level (perhaps not surprising as she has been an economics professor for many years) and this reviewer is not an “economist” by education or profession.

            However as a student of the works of John Maynard Keynes, I believe Professor Keynes would point out at least two immense “holes” in MMT theory as presented in The Deficit Myth.

            The first concerns her arguments that non inflationary deficit spending should not be worrisome enough not to fund needed social program and infrastructure spending. 

            While Ms. Kelton acknowledges the influence of the  work of John Maynard Keynes on MMT; she appears to have overlooked one of the foundations of his work:  that there are no such things as “rational markets” or “formulas” that can govern macroeconomic planning simply because too many humans do not make economic (and all other kinds of) decisions “rationally.”

           One of Professor Keynes favorite analogies illustrating this principle was investment in the stock market.  Then (when he was writing in the 1920s and 30s) as now the vast majority of stock investors do not do their own research into which companies have the best fiscal management, long term track record, etc. The vast majority of investors buy what other investors they consider successful buy (or based upon what they hear “through the grapevine”).  Mr. Keynes would not be surprised at all by the number of “Buffetteers” in today’s stock market.

            Professor Keynes would certainly respond to Ms. Kelton’s MMT arguments concerning federal deficit spending that while it may not be the “monster” that must be slain from either a fiscal or monetary macroeconomic standpoint, the size of the deficit (and its accumulation into the “national debt” now standing at about 22 trillion dollars) does have psychological and emotional effects as impactful in macroeconomics as any fiscal or monetary policy.

            Consequently Professor Keynes would argue that there always has to be some long term plan to at least control, even better slowly reduce, over time federal fiscal deficits.  Otherwise at some point the “psychological” effect of the size of continuing federal deficits (and accumulating national debt) will be that producers, consumers and/or investors will lose “confidence” in the strength and safety of U.S. dollars resulting in all sorts of serious social and economic consequences.

            I believe Professor Keynes would also disagree with the second principle assertion of Ms. Kelton that “the monster in the house to be slain” is neither the deficit nor inflation, but in the slowly ever increasing unequal distribution of wealth in the United States.

            That is an issue Ms. Kelton refers to at several points in her book but her only apparent solution is a “federal job guarantee” at a “living wage” of “15 an hour”  to create constant full time employment for every American who wants to work.  (And that may be enough for a single worker to support themself.  However the common opinion is that a “living wage” where one person can work one full time job and support a family of up to four persons is actually somewhere around $32 an hour (approximately $67,000 a year before taxes.)

            However while a federal job guarantee may create “full employment” such a policy will not create an equal distribution of wealth in America.

            As President Lincoln so poignantly emphasized over a century and a half ago “since all capital is derived from (someone’s) labor” and “there would be no capital without labor:”  only when the vast majority of American workers have either an ownership and/or profit sharing interest in the businesses for which they generate every penny of its income will the socio-economic problem of the gross inequitable distribution of wealth finally be solved in a capitalist economy.

TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES

DEFINITION OF PERSONS, CITIZENS AND SPEECH

AND

FINANCING OF FEDERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGNS

SECTION 1:  Only a human being may be either a “person” or “citizen” as those terms are used in the Constitution of The United States of America.  No artificially created legal entity—including by way of example, but not limitation, any corporation, partnership, sole proprietorship, limited liability company or association—is either a person or a citizen as those terms are used in this Constitution.

SECTION 2: The making of a financial contribution in cash or in property to a candidate for federal office is not “speech” as that term in used in this Constitution or in any of its Amendments.

SECTION 3:  No person other than a citizen of the United States may make a financial contribution to any candidate for any federal elective office, and the maximum dollar amount that any citizen may make to any candidate during the current election cycle for that office in cash or in property shall be One Thousand Dollars ($1,000.00) in cash and/or the fair market value of that property adjusted for inflation annually by the Bureau of Consumer Affairs or another federal agency designated by the President and the Congress.  Subject to this dollar limitation, a U.S. citizen may make as many contributions to other candidates for the same federal office during the current election cycle and/or contributions to candidates for other federal offices during the current election cycle as the citizen desires.

SECTION 4:  In addition to the rights of citizens to make financial contributions to candidates for federal elective office, Congress may enact laws establishing the public financing of federal election campaigns by use of only public funds, or by use of public funds and matching taxpayer contributions; provided that, no candidate for a particular federal office shall receive more of such funds than any other candidate for the same office during the current election cycle.

SECTION 5: No candidate for any federal office shall personally retain any amount of unspent citizen or publicly financed campaign funding.  Any and all such campaign funds shall be either returned pro rata to each citizen contributor and/or the public financing fund from which such funds were obtained as determined by the candidate.

DIRECT ELECTION OF PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT

               SECTION 1: The Twelfth Article of Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is repealed in its entirety.

               SECTION 2: The second, third and fourth paragraphs of Section 1 of Article II of the Constitution of the United States pertaining to the appointment, meeting and functions of Electors are repealed in their entirety and replaced with the following paragraphs:

               The election of the President and Vice President of the United States shall be made by the people thereof.  All Citizens of the United States 18 years of age or older shall be entitled to vote for candidates for the Offices of President and Vice President of the United States.

               The candidate for the Office of President and the Office of Vice President of the United States who respectively receive the majority of all votes cast to fill those respective Offices for their next succeeding terms shall be elected to that Office.

               In the event that no candidate for the Office of President or Vice President of the United States receives a majority of the votes cast on the date of that election, within seven (7) days of the date of that election, a second election shall be held between the two candidates for the Office of President and Office of Vice President who received the highest and next highest number of votes for that Office.  There shall be no additional campaigning by any person during the interval between elections.  The candidate for the Office of President and the Office of Vice President of the United States who respectively receive the majority of all votes cast to fill those respective Offices for the next succeeding term of those Offices in the second election shall be elected to those Offices.

               SECTION 3. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

ISBN Hardcover 0-7679-0553-4

               First my apologies to Mr. Phillips because  I am going to disagree with the author’s sub-title of this book “A Political History of the American Rich.”  In fact I think that subtitle is unfortunate because the book’s scope and contribution to American political-economic history are much broader than that subtitle suggests, and therefore may have discouraged a much wider readership which the book deserves.

               As a certified “History Geek” since 7^th grade, I found Mr. Phillips tome the best I have ever read on the subject matter which is really how American republican democracy has failed to solve the millennial problem in the history of civilization of the unequal distribution of wealth between the only persons in a business who make any money for that business—i.e. the persons who provide its services, make its product and/or sell them--and management and investors.

               True Mr. Phillips seems centered on measuring the concentration of Americans’ total net work in its top 1%  of the population, but whether we use that metric to measure wealth inequality which currently stands at 34% or a broader metric that 86% of the nation’s wealth is currently owned by 20% of its population, the end result is the same.  Since the 1970s America’s wealth has progressively been concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

               What I found makes Mr. Phillips book particularly  timeless is the chapter in which Mr. Phillips briefly reviews the economic history of the three greatest economic powers before the international economic ascendancy of the U.S.: Spain, Holland and Britain (and BEFORE the world wars decimated the wealth of all three).

               In of each of these countries their middle classes made significant gains in wealth while each of these countries remained primarily industrial and exporting powers and then all three suffered significant declines in equitable distribution of wealth when each country’s elites converted their respective economies from manufacturing and exporting to trade and finance—i.e. from an industrial to a service economy.  Of course the most immediate effect was lower wage earnings generally associated with service sector jobs vs jobs that require skilled work. (And in the U.S. as of 2018 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (“BLS”) average industrial wages remain 85% higher than average service sector wages.)

               That historical review is particularly poignant to America today where according to the BLS just 8.5% of American workers are employed in manufacturing.

               One of  the epigraphs Mr. Phillips chose to precede Wealth and Democracy is President Truman’s “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”  So far, I have not read a better book that fills the knowledge gap regarding American Wealth and Democracy than Mr. Phillips" work.

LCCN Print 2019037057 E-Book 2019037058

ISBN Hardcover 9780525509035 E-Book 9780525509042

               Price of Peace is more a history of economic theory in the 20^th Century than a traditional biography of a “life.”  And for all of us who find Mr. Keynes “master work” The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money practically impenetrable (which Mr. Keynes stated he “chiefly addressed” to other economists), Price of Peace is a most welcome distillation of the General Theory which will make that work much more accessible to everyone.

               Perhaps even more importantly Price of Peace will dispel many, if not all, of the myths spread by pundits and politicians over decades in the media about Mr. Keynes and his work..  The unfortunate  consequence of Professor Keynes writing such an esoteric tome as the General Theory was the result that, as Harvard Professor Alvin Hansen wrote back in the 1950s: “many people talk about the General Theory but few have read it.”

               The major myths busted  by Mr. Carter:

               - Professor Keynes was a “socialist” (or worse).  Actually Professor Keynes spent most of his career defending capitalism and trying to make it perform better against socialist, communist and fascist economic theory which all became particularly popular in the after math of WWI (which destroyed pre-war Europe’s economic system) and during the Great Depression.

               -Keynes was a “deficit spender.”  Actually, according to Professor Keynes, there were only two principal justifications for fiscal deficit spending: (1) when the economy entered a retraction cycle to avoid it from becoming a recession; and (2) when an economy was already in a recession (or during the 1930s a depression).

               -Keynes was a “tax hiker.”  Actually Mr. Keynes was a strong advocate of cutting government taxes DURING periods of government surplus—i.e. economic expansion.

               Other major themes of Keynesian Economics reviewed in Price of Peace:

               -Unregulated or deregulated market economies are not “self correcting” as the Great Depression and Great Recession respectively demonstrated.

               -There is no such place as a “rational economic market” whose predictability can be calculated by mathematical models because people do not make investment, saving, production and/or consumption decisions totally rationally; but also on the basis of self interest and security.

               -Macro economy is primarily driven by consumption rather than investment or monetary policy.  The more money the economy (i.e. not the government by printing more money) places in the hands of worker-consumers the more money is available to purchase goods and services and for investment.  In other words “demand and wealth must be created from the bottom up” not from the top down. 

               -The vast majority of stock investors do not “investigate or study” the stocks they buy.  They primarily buy the stocks that they see other investors buy.  (Mr. Keynes must be in his heavenly armchair smiling down at all of the Buffetteers.”)

               -Effective economic policy must be primarily based on common sense and an understanding of public expectations—i.e. psychology—rather than any one economic theory or formula.

               -The gross disparity of wealth is the great economic problem that democracies must address or socialism, communism or dictatorship—i.e. government “centralization” of economic direction--will always return.  A trend we can certainly see in many the world’s economies today.

Finally what this reader found particularly refreshing was Mr. Carter’s discussion of the criticisms and “reactions against” Keynesian economic theory.  We get a good dose of Hayek, Friedman, Phillips (we all remember The Phillips Curve, right?), Galbraith, Rubin and others in Price of Peace.

I believe Professor Keynes would have approved of that discussion since another trend we see in Mr. Carter's "life" of Keynes is that he  significantly altered his economic thinking over his lifetime based upon the thoughts of both colleagues, competitors and changing world economic conditions. 

Consequently Professor Keynes most influential and lasting legacy may be his treating economic theory as a constantly changing to meet current economic conditions model rather than any “classical” economic theory fixed in the prejudices and conditions of the past.

And perhaps Mr. Carter’s lasting legacy will be to have finally made Keynes basic economic theories accessible and understandable to both politicians and the general public free of all of the nonsense peddled by so many political talking heads for decades.  Now anyone who is interested in what Professor Keynes basically actually said and meant can do so by reading Mr. Carter's book.

Certainly this is a signifcant accomplishment long overdue, and one can only hope Mr. Carter will continue to “de-mystify” economic theory for all of us in future works.