By this yardstick, Keynes commented, Wall Street could not ‘be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism–which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object’.22 That ‘different object’, in Keynes’s view, was not a form of production, but ‘betting’–and the profits of the bookmaker were ‘a mere transfer’,23 a transfer which should be limited lest individuals ruin themselves and harm others in the process.
