Keynes deflected much criticism by his famous dictum that in the long run we are all dead — a declaration that economic well-being in the here and now has come to outrank posterity as the reason for a civil society. This declaration has become the meta-policy of all economics; its sheer social magnitude diminishing all other theoretical assertions to equal insignificance. The Aristotelian mean of neoclassicism’s economic optimum is unacceptable as social policy because it limits passive incomes to no more than an economy’s net product. Politics, backed by its police powers, now directs limitless expansions of passive income from public debt that far exceed what might be possible on the basis of mere technical advancement.

But there remains a problem with sustaining capitalism through the artificial induction of demand for its own sake: consumption of whatever production ensues must be forced without regard for utility of the product. Keynesianism worked for the Nazis because their state-induced demand was for capital goods (e.g.: the autobahn) that produced healthy material returns. But, the utility of war having withered with the invention of weapons too terrible to actually use, what remains to provide sufficient incomes for those dependent on returns from investment?

One answer has been to sell over-production through the agency of government purchases sustained by the power to tax and borrow. War yielded the first model for such solutions. And, when America's military-industrial-congressional complex finally drove its Soviet competitor out of business in the 1990's, it arranged for the taxpayer to purchase a second arms race by transferring the necessary technology to the Chinese. Where America's gift of its nuclear secrets to Stalin in 1947 was transacted by espionage, the similar transfer to China in 1996 was an open market transaction — one facilitated by a gratuity to the reigning US political party, and soon ratified by their re-election.

Entrepreneurship of this order has discovered that all sorts of social assets can be melted down so that their value might flow into private hands. The foremost example of this trend would be the family, which is being liquidated in service to opportunity:

Capitalistic consumerism creates a popular culture that ridicules, taxes, and subverts marriage. Divorce is an industry; husbands are replaced by family courts; and fathers are left without their ennobling duties.

A professional educational establishment has convinced parents that their children have been so damaged by a bigoted culture that repair of their personalities must take precedence over real learning.

Children are not cultivated; they are confiscated for input to a unionized education sector based on assembly-line principles. Except insofar as they are taught to accept boredom — by drug-induced coma when necessary — children are certainly not educated to take a place in any sort of adult world.

The child's right to grow up gives way to the remorseless economics of education, viz.:  keeping children 1) childishly incapable of resisting admonitions to consume; and 2) out of the labor market for as long as possible into their prime consuming years.

Sensation of this stolen birthright is not beyond youthful intuition. School architecture must therefore increasingly resemble that of a medium security prison — with violent escapes from either institution becoming fascinating input to professionally perplexed interlocutors of the public conversation.

While Libertarian economists decry enterprise in this form, labeling it ‘rent seeking’ or ‘careerism’, their argument simply does not occur within the realm of economic ideas. In the strict economic terms adduced by Keynes, mining the social order is indistinguishable from mining coal; and there is no free-market doctrine by which initiative in either sphere might be discouraged. Meanwhile, public servants receive Keynesian doctrine as measuring the public good in terms of their expenditures from the public purse – thereby ordaining a duty which they have since dispatched with terrific enthusiasm.

Though Marx did not anticipate the Keynesian impediment to the future’s unfolding as he foresaw, the unfolding we have witnessed shows the convergence of their policies. Keynes’ prescription of state-induced demand, like its theoretical substrate, has no equilibrium. It loses potency with each succeeding dose. And, like Marxism, it will ultimately require that everyone will be employed by, or imprisoned by, the state.

When the professional managers of actual businesses tire of competition, they merge. When their combinations overwhelm the regulatory power of the market, they hire lobbyists to negotiate a schedule for transfer of their shareholders equity to elected officials. In Europe a government will, on behalf of the taxpayer, simply trade in the shares of those enterprises that it finds attractive, threatening, or in need of rescue. In America, public officials are more circumspect, demanding some form of personal tribute rather than dividends in exchange for restraining their prerogative to sue, regulate, nationalize, or withhold subsidy.

Lobbyists become a corporation’s chief center of profit. By keeping enough of the right people in office, they can arrange the uncertainties of business such that their clients’ profits remain private while their losses are socialized. In those industries that have been effectively nationalized by such arrangements, e.g. banking and insurance, the possibility of private enterprise no longer exists. At this limit of its development, capitalism’s last refuge is in the state.

Thus the West arrives in its own way at an Asian model that seems somehow destined to emerge, whether in descent from the Leninist revolution of Mao, or from the post-colonial parliaments deposited along the Pacific rim after World War II. Significant enterprises are state monopolies; economic competition takes place among the state systems in a global market; and profit does not result from technical improvements so much as the system's overall trade balance. Capital is stateless, as is the competition for work among populations.

The one barrier to US submergence in this new global order is its Constitution, which is being entirely deconstructed by systematic defiance on the part of elected officials. The defiance is reported with due alarm, and then ratified by a quiescent electorate:

The vaunted First Amendment, for example, is now discovered to have been enacted on behalf of advertisers and pornographers — political speech being appropriately regulated by commissions on debates and elections.

Public observance of religious sentiment is actionable.

Property is no longer private: a recent Supreme Court decision has decreed that land and improvements belong to whatever operation promises to generate the most tax revenue.

The most intimate of searches is now a requisite of group travel.

Though the population has never been more disaffected from governance, redistricting for the sake of incumbency now has less turnover occurring in the US House of Representatives than in the old Soviet Duma, or even the British House of Lords.

The public is apparently persuaded that their children are not loved unless they support a cabinet-level Educational Czar in something approaching Oriental luxury.

Progress in medicine is now a gift of the National Institutes of Health, where careers are critically dependent on just the right beliefs regarding the AIDS and COVID phenomena.

The National Science Foundation (where global warming and ozone depletion are official facts) satisfies the public’s curiosity by distributing their appropriations in massive excess to private subscriptions.

US petro-military adventurism is not only global, it extends to low earth orbit. Soldiers who will not wear the insignia of a nascent global authority are court-martialed.

Constitutional provisions for impeaching a president are now null when exercised in the midst of favorable economic news. This was recently concluded by no less august personages than the Senate Majority Leader and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in the impeachment of a president from their opposite political party.

As prospects diminish for its continued affluence and freedom, the middle class will apparently decline to procreate, and opt for what they conceive to be the safety of state enterprise — perhaps as the only visible refuge from the public sector ‘entrepreneurs’ who are now consuming the possibility of civil decency’s continuance into the future.