Ninety-six-year-old John Kenneth Galbraith spent his adult life urging Amerca — and the world — to embrace socialism and reject capitalism. He told us, fifty years ago, that there was NO problem in any city that could not be solved by a doubling of the city government’s budget. He is best known for his incorrect theory of the “dependence effect,” which says that because of advertising, we spend too much on “useless” things and pay too little in taxes for the “good” things government gives us. He was dead wrong about just about everything he wrote and spoke about, in other words.

Now, after having written several autobiograhies, there is a new “authorized biography” of Galbraith. The February issue of Vanity Fair featured a short interview with him on its back page, labing him a “champion of progressive thought.”

Galbraith spent his entire life repeating over and over and over again the same old tired, socialist nostrums to anyone who would listen. Yet in response to the question, “What is the trait you most deplore in others?”, he answered, “The habit of offering uncontrolled repetitive counsel and advice.”

This champion of socialism and every other variety of failed interventionism proudly boasts to Vanity Fair that his “greatest achievement” was “helping to rescue economic scholarship from its committed and often self-serving error.”

The “most overrated virtue,” says Galbraith, is “Modesty — a contrived virtue.”