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

We can clarify our thinking if we put our chief emphasis where it belongs—on policies that will maximize production.

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”

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.

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.

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

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

Let us, therefore, try to see exactly what happens when technical improvements and labor-saving machinery are introduced.

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.