This is what it is like to be living in Beijing in the time of Bo. China is undergoing its biggest political crisis since the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, as wild supposition mixes with outlandish facts to shift the city’s rumor mill into overdrive. Young Chinese in stylish bars, antsy American investors, civil servants, students, and entrepreneurs all swap stories of political backstabbing and collusion. There’s a feeling of nervous anticipation for what lies ahead. The fact that no one seems to know how things will unfold makes the frisson only stronger.

Whether it is on Iran, which he will prevent from getting a nuclear weapon (“period”), or China, which on his first day in office he will brand a currency manipulator, he seems comfortable tossing out the red meat. While many social and even fiscal conservatives withhold trust in Mr Romney’s authenticity, most neoconservatives have been with him all along.

Even the “paleocons” warmed to Mr Romney. At the start of the year John Bolton, the fire and brimstone former US ambassador to the UN, endorsed Mr Romney even though Newt Gingrich promised to make him his secretary of state. Foreign policy hardliners do not seem to doubt Mr Romney’s credentials. And he does not seem to doubt theirs.

Few on the Romney list of advisers could be described as belonging to the James Baker school of diplomacy, which used to be described as “realist” and which once dominated the Republican world view. That space is now occupied by Barack Obama. Mr Romney’s advisory team is less diverse than George W. Bush’s group of “vulcans”, which included realists such as Condoleezza Rice, Robert Zoellick and Robert Blackwill.

Among its leading lights is Richard Williamson, a former Bush official, who last week said Mr Obama’s “Mother, may I?” approach to Iran and China would end under Romney. Then there is Dan Senor, Mr Bush’s ever-bullish spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. On national security there is Cofer Black, the former CIA counter-terrorism chief and senior executive at Blackwater, the private security group that so besmirched itself it changed its name to Xe.

Mr Romney’s Europe team is headed by Nile Gardiner, who helped Lady Thatcher write her memoirs and is now at the Heritage Foundation from where he denounces Mr Obama’s “humiliation” of Britain. One of Mr Romney’s top three advisers on the Middle East and north Africa is Walid Phares, an American from Lebanon, who trained Maronite Christian militants during that country’s strife-torn 1980s. And so on.

On paper, therefore, and on the hustings, the case looks open and shut: Mr Romney is a hardliner with an instinct for unilateralism. 

 there are fundamentally two different ways of looking at work. One is capitalist ideology. That basically takes for granted that the natural state of a person is to vegetate. You have to be driven to work. If you aren’t driven to work you’ll lie around watching television or take your money from the welfare office and you won’t do anything. So therefore there have to be punishments for not working and rewards for working.

There’s a different conception, which goes right back to the Enlightenment. And that’s one that regards work as one of the highest goals in life. But they’re referring to a special kind of work: creative work taken under your own control and under your own initiative. That’s a very different conception of work, one that’s pretty familiar to all of us. If you just walk down the halls around here [at MIT], you’ll see people working, maybe 80 hours a week, working hard. Because they like what they’re doing! They’re fundamentally controlling their own work––challenging issues, etc.

But you don’t have to be an engineer and a scientist to do that. The same is true of carpenters, plumbers. I know artisans who just love their work; they’ll do it in their spare time. Maybe they have to do it in a factory during the day, but during the weekend they’ll go in the garage and build a car or something like that. Because it’s something they want to do. And I think almost all work can be like that.

But, fundamentally, it’s back to just different conceptions of what work is. And what human beings are. I mean, are they, kind of, in their nature, dependent couch potatoes? Or are they people who want to become involved in creative, exciting, challenging work that they control themselves and cooperatively with others?

Again, if you walk down the halls you see students talking to each other. A lot of the work that gets done is cooperative work. That’s the way things happen almost anywhere.

I think that, once one recognizes this fact that both Keynes and Friedman are to the activist left of even the left edge of today's policy spectrum, one cannot then escape the conclusion that today the entire right wing and a good part of the center is simply not sane.