Daily Inspiration Quote by John Maynard Keynes

Keynes lands the punch by writing like a scandalized Victorian and a tabloid moralist at once. The deliberately ungrammatical “most wickedest” isn’t a mistake; it’s a sneer. He’s mocking a doctrine that dresses self-interest up as public virtue, taking the pieties of laissez-faire and exaggerating them until they look like what he thinks they are: a faith-based claim about human nature.

The line works because it flips capitalism’s central alibi. Markets often justify themselves with an almost alchemical promise: private vice transmutes into public benefit, “invisible hand” style. Keynes presses on the most fragile hinge in that story - not that people pursue self-interest, but that their pursuit is reliably channeled toward socially optimal outcomes. By calling the actors “wicked,” he spotlights the moral abdication hiding inside the efficiency talk: the system asks you not merely to tolerate greed, but to trust it as a civic engine.

Context matters. Keynes is writing in the long shadow of industrial boom-and-bust, and soon the catastrophe of the Great Depression, when the idea that markets self-corrected looked less like science and more like prayer. His broader project wasn’t anti-market romanticism; it was a refusal to confuse a useful mechanism with a moral philosophy. The subtext is a warning to elites: if your social order depends on sanctifying the worst impulses, don’t be shocked when the “greatest good” fails to show up on schedule.