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

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.

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

It was inserted partly in the hope of boosting the worker’s weekly income, and partly in the hope that, by discouraging the employer from taking on anyone regularly for more than forty hours a week, it would force him to employ additional workers instead.

In order that new industries may grow fast enough it is usually necessary that some old industries should be allowed to shrink or die. In doing this they help to release the necessary capital and labor for the new industires.

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

much of tens of thousands of different commodities and services should be produced in relation to each other. These otherwise bewildering equations are solved quasi-automatically by the system of prices, profits and costs.

The real result of the machine is to increase production, to raise the standard of living, to increase economic welfare.

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.

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