Dead Men Who's Influences Are Still With Us Today Episode 9

 In Seven Men Who Rule the World from the Grave, Breese treats John Maynard Keynes not primarily as an economist, but as a shaper of modern assumptions about money, government, and man's responsibility.

Here’s the pattern of how he presents him:

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1️⃣ Keynes as a Shift in Economic Philosophy

Breese argues that Keynes represents a turning point from:

• Economic restraint → managed stimulus

• Balanced budgets → deficit spending

• Market correction → government intervention

• Moral economics → technocratic economics

In Breese’s view, Keynes normalized the idea that governments could:

• Spend beyond their means

• Use debt strategically

• Manage economies through centralized policy

Breese sees that as more than economics — he sees it as a philosophical shift about authority and accountability.

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2️⃣ Tone Toward Keynes

Like with Wellhausen, Breese does not portray Keynes as evil or foolish.
He portrays him as:

• Brilliant

• Influential

• Culturally catalytic

But also as someone whose ideas carried unintended moral consequences.

Breese tends to emphasize:

• Keynes’ confidence in elite management

• His dismissal of long-term consequences (“In the long run we are all dead”)

• His belief that economic structures could be engineered

Breese interprets that famous line as symptomatic of a mindset that prioritizes immediate relief over enduring moral order.

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3️⃣ The Larger Concern

Breese connects Keynes to a broader 20th-century move:

From:

Self-discipline and providence

To:

System-management and state dependency

He suggests that once economic order becomes detached from moral law, it becomes subject to political manipulation.

In Breese’s framework, Keynes becomes emblematic of:

• The technocratic confidence of modernity

• Faith in systems over character

• Management over stewardship

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4️⃣ Important Context

To keep balance:

• Keynes was responding to the Great Depression — a real crisis.

• Many mainstream economists still credit him with stabilizing economies.

• Debate continues between Keynesian and free-market schools.

Breese writes from a clear Christian worldview lens, so his evaluation is moral-theological, not purely economic.

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5️⃣ It's almost as if an  “invisible hand” 

 not in a conspiratorial sense, but in an uncanny philosophical continuity.

Breese’s point across these men Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Julius Wellhausen, John Dewey, Sigmund Freud, John Maynard Keynes, and Soren Kierkegaard. is not that they collaborated.

It’s that:

• They shared modern assumptions.

• Those assumptions weakened transcendence.

• Those ideas filtered into institutions.

Wellhausen reshaped how people read Scripture.
Keynes reshaped how people view money and authority.

Different fields. Similar philosophical confidence in people's management thinking.

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