The Army Of Relief And Other Subsidy

Once The Premise Is Accepted That Poverty Is Never The Fault Of The Poor But The Fault Of 'society,' Or Of 'the Capitalist System, Then There Is No Definable Limit To Be Set On Relief, And The Politicians Who Want To Be Elected Or Reelected Will Compete With Each Other In Proposing New 'welfare' Programs To Fill Some Hitherto 'unmet Need.'

There Is A Strange Idea Aboard, Held By All Monetary Cranks, That Credit Is Something A Banker Gives To A Man. Credit, On The Contrary, Is Something A Man Already Has. He Has It, Perhaps, Because He Already Has Marketable Assets Of A Greater Cash Value Than The Loan For Which He Is Asking. Or He Has It Because His Character And Past Record Have Earned It. He Brings It Into The Bank With Him. That Is Why The Banker Makes Him The Loan.

The Most Obvious And Yet The Oldest And Most Stubborn Error On Which The Appeal Of Inflation Rests Is That Of Confusing ‘money’ With ‘wealth’…real Wealth, Of Course, Consists In What Is Produced And Consumed: The Food We Eat, The Clothes We Wear, The Houses We Live In. It Is Railways And Roads And Motor Cars; Ships And Planes And Factories; Schools And Churches And Theaters; Pianos, Paintings And Books. Yet So Powerful Is The Verbal Ambiguity That Confuses Money With Wealth, That Even Those Who At Times Recognize The Confusion Will Slide Back Into It In The Course Of Their Reasoning.

A Hundred Welfare Programs, Spending More And More Billions, Lead To Chronic Budget Deficits, Which Lead To Increased Paper-money Issues, Which Lead To Higher Prices.

The Art Of Economics Consists In Looking Not Merely At The Immediate But At The Longer Effects Of Any Act Or Policy; It Consists In Tracing The Consequences Of That Policy Not Merely For One Group But For All Groups.