For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs

if there was great disharmony, either branch of the government might force an immediate general election. The President could do so by dissolving Congress; the Congress, by a vote of no confidence. The latter vote was in the House alone, the Senate wasn’t empowered.

He became convinced that ordinary commercial financing could be done for a service charge plus an insurance fee amounting to much less than the current rates of interest charged by banks, whose rates were based on supply and demand, treating money as a commodity rather than as a sovereign state’s means of exchange.

But most of all he came to despise the almost universal deceit, half lies and downright falsehood that had vitiated the life of 1939. He realized that it had been a land of hokum and cheat. The political speeches, the advertising slogans, the spit-licking, prostituted preachers, the billboards, the ballyhoo, the kept press, the pussy-footing profes

A country needs enough money to enable its citizens to perform all desired exchanges of goods and services.

Try this definition: ‘Money is anything which can always be swapped for goods, or services.’ I believe that you will find that to be the only characteristic common to all money, and common to nothing else.

He ordered fractional reserves increased in a program that called for one hundred per cent reserves at the end of three years.

You will certainly agree that such was the condition from 1929 to 1939. It was generally recognized and the government even went so far as to partially make up the spread between prices and income by direct relief—giving money away—and wages for made work—giving money away with a moralistic sugar coating. This would have been sensible had the gover

“All forms of organized religion are alike in certain social respects. Each claims to be the sole custodian of the essential truth. Each claims to speak with final authority on all ethical questions. And every church has requested, demanded, or ordered the state to enforce its particular system of taboos. No church ever withdraws its claims to cont

“The paradoxes you appeared to find arise from flaws in your training. They have no reality. I am about to state an axiom: Anything which is physically possible can be made financially possible, if the people of a state desire it.”