Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics

It would be far better, if that were the choice—which it isn’t—to have maximum production with part of the population supported in idleness by undisguised relief than to provide “full employment”

What has happened is merely that one thing has been created instead of others.

This is only another way of saying that the government lenders will take risks with other people’s money (the taxpayers’) that private lenders will not take with their own money.

Here we shall have to say simply that all government expenditures must eventually be paid out of the proceeds of taxation; that inflation itself is merely a form, and a particularly vicious form, of taxation.

But a bridge built primarily “to provide employment” is a different kind of bridge. When providing employment becomes the end, need becomes a subordinate consideration. “Projects” have to be invented. Instead of thinking only of where bridges must be built, the government spenders begin to ask themselves where bridges can be built.

They lend him the other three-fourths; and he gets the farm. There is a strange idea abroad, 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.

Therefore, for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else.

either immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation.

Everything we get, outside of the free gifts of nature, must in some way be paid for.