A word from Minsky on Keynes and Socialism

https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/hm_archive/16/ 

Though I admire both deeply enough to consider myself a post-Keynesian in my political economic thinking, I am not fully on the same page as either Minsky or Keynes, and I wonder if Minsky's claims about Keynes in this brief note are fully true: that he believed once full employment was achieved, distribution problems would take care of themselves.  If so, it is a weakness in Keynes' thinking.  (But I suspect Keynes's actual thinking is not so neatly summarized.  I believe he was horrified by militarism.)

Of course, we haven't tested his hypothesis really...has truly "full" employment ever been achieved?

But the most important problem isn't even distribution as such.  It is what the hell are we working on.  Solve that, and the full employment problem, and we are much closer to having solved the distribution problem.

And the answer to that for the Soviet Union is that it was working on independence and self-preservation amidst continued economic and threatened military warfare from the western imperium.

I would blame any economic failures foremost on that what the hell, in this case endless war.

You could argue that similar mis-orientation was involved in USA (and still is).  But he USA had and still has enormous material and strategic advantages, so nothing important about the comparative viability of Socialism vs Capitalism is clear from this history, except that discrediting the ability of either to produce on any simple basis is without merit.

The real problem that hasn't been solved isn't exactly economics.  It is the problem of governance (which includes the governance of finance and baking and corporations).  How do we decide what the hell we are working on?

Markets are of only limited value here, and "free markets" and "democracy" have never existed (let alone being fully incompatible).  Wealth and power are everything and should be nothing.  That is the problem.