By Will Beaman
John Maynard Keynes’s call for the “euthanasia of the rentier” has long occupied an uneasy place on the left. In the decades after World War II, as a domesticated “bastard Keynesianism” became part of Cold War economic governance, the phrase often came to symbolize an idealist hope that class antagonism could be managed away through lower interest rates and expert macroeconomic policy. Yet Keynes’s metaphor permits a more capacious program than interest-rate management alone. Read today, amid the renewed possibility of left governance after Trump, the “euthanasia of the rentier” can be taken up as a deeper provocation. Rather than asking how to protect democracy from finance, we must ask how to redesign finance so that democratic commitments become the highest-priority promises in the system.
Today, promises to private creditors are treated as inviolable while democratic commitments—to employment, education, housing, public health, reparations, libraries, and ecological repair—are treated as mere aspirations to be fulfilled only sometimes as discretionary expenditures.
Euthanizing the rentier begins with inverting this hierarchy. Private financial claims should remain enforceable only insofar as they do not undermine the standing promises a democracy makes to the people it governs. And that means giving democratic commitments institutional form.
Reparations should be recognized by central banking and public finance institutions as a permanent public obligation capable of capitalizing the institutions charged with carrying it out.
Libraries, schools, and guaranteed employment should be recognized as productive public assets rather than accounting costs. Public balance sheets should be organized around expanding democratic capacity instead of maximizing returns to creditors. What does this mean concretely and institutionally?
First, it means establishing a hierarchy of public promises. Employment, housing, health, education, climate obligations, reparations, and basic public services become primary public commitments. When private financial promises conflict with this, they’re restructured and/or written off completely.
Second, it means turning democratic obligations into financeable public assets. Law should authorize institutions to record the capacities that reparations, the right to a job, etc. create as durable public assets and to issue claims against the continuing public commitment to maintain them.
Third, changing central bank collateral rules. Central banks should accept bonds and obligations issued for democratically authorized purposes, purchase them directly or through public intermediaries, and provide permanent refinancing facilities. Private investors should have no role to play.
Fourth, it means building public balance sheet institutions wherever it’s possible. Public banks, reparations trusts, employment authorities, housing funds, and municipal finance facilities should be empowered to hold public assets, issue promises of their own and collateralize public commitments.
Fifth, cut out bond markets. There are other ways to tell if an investment is sustainable than if it makes money for a rich person. Charter public banks and have them purchase bonds and deposit interests in public coffers like Money on the Left‘s “Seattle Loop” plan.
Sixth, formalize the breaking of creditor power by making creditor claims revisable by design rather than only during emergencies.
Lastly (seventhly), reform public accounting. Fiscal rules should measure whether spending creates and sustains real capacities, rather than treating all public outlays as costs. Record jobs, functioning institutions, public knowledge, and social stability as assets and capacities, not as costs.
In summary, euthanizing the rentier should prompt a constitutional reordering of public finance: Democratic commitments must be formalized as durable claims on the state, institutions must be created to carry and refinance those claims, and private creditors must lose the power to decide whether those promises are affordable.
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