Debt: Private and Public, Good and Bad

Sir Ernest Benn

From the author:

The world would be a dismal place if everyone understood the technicalities of the Money Market. Most people know that they can more or less rely upon £3 a week, £1,000 a year or whatever it may be, and, being wholly ignorant of the science of money, are able to give their thoughts to other things, perhaps better things, certainly happier things. They cheerfully part with thirty-pence worth of real values, taking in exchange a piece of metal called half-a-crown containing sixpennyworth of silver. They buy twenty shillings’ worth of groceries, giving in exchange a piece of paper called a pound note, worth, as paper, a fraction of a tenth of a farthing. All that is very happy and very convenient and there is no reason to disturb it, if it is going to last, if it is in no danger.

Among the sound political and moral notions on which we have relied, are the two with which this little book is concerned. First, that family finance and national finance are both subject to the same principles and governed by the same forces. And second, that a debt is a thing to be incurred with great caution and, above all, that it has to be paid. These platitudinous propositions have been forgotten in connection with a great deal of the public and political work of the last twenty years.

Debt: Private and Public, Good and Bad by Sir Ernest Benn

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Sir Ernest Benn
Mises Daily Sir Ernest Benn
[Excerpted from chapter 6 of Debt: Private and Public, Good and Bad, 1938] British World War I Propaganda Poster Good debt is, as we have seen, an essential part of our financial foundations; without...
Mises Daily Sir Ernest Benn
Our management of money is advocated as a way to save us from the rigors of the natural law, but it would appear that enormous inequality, indeed injustice, may result from these strange modern conceptions of the proper functions of a national treasury.
Mises Daily Sir Ernest Benn
I understand that in the United States there are still those who think that the machinery of government can be used as a substitute for personal responsibility on the part of the governed. This idea, as we know only too well in Britain, is the open road to disaster. It changes persons with responsibilities into robots with rights.
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References

Ernest Benn Limited, London, 1938