[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...
Sir Ernest Benn
Sir Ernest John Pickstone Benn, 2nd Baronet (1875–1954) was a British publisher, writer, and political publicist. He was the first president of The Society of Individualists (founded in 1942), which later merged with the National League for Freedom to become the Society for Individual Freedom. From his conversion to classical liberalism in the mid-1920s until his death in 1954, Benn published books and pamphlets on individualism and the free market. His The Confessions of a Capitalist was originally published in 1925 and was still in print twenty years later after selling a quarter of a million copies.
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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.
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.
