lp4guld

such things. A democratic government cannot. The author of thearticle from which I have quoted tops it off with the admiring observationthat "the Nazis by experimentation were learning what todo while Keynes was discussing these theories in England." This iswhat is being offered to America. I quote once more:The irony of this financial revolution that has been unfolded in Germanylies in its implications for the future of economic democracy. Whatthe Nazis have done, in essence, is to begin to chart the unknown realmsof the dynamic use of government securities. Tragically for Germany andthe whole world the brilliant contribution of her financial genius has beenobscured by its diversion to the uses of tyranny and destruction. But canany of these financial methods be utilized so that a wise, self-governingpeople, determined to preserve individual freedom and anxious to make fulluse of individual initiative, could make private enterprise and capitalismbetter serve the purposes of economic democracy? If this is so—and I believeit is—we shall do well to examine the potentialities of this new arithmeticof finance as carefully and dispassionately as we should study, letus say, those of a new German development in aircraft manufacture, andseize upon whatever we can use for our own democratic ends.This was written in 1941. The author was painfully behind the times.For already in 1938 the administration had practically seized uponthis theory of finance.It is a little astonishing how far the parallel between our fiscaltheories and those of Germany go and how, once adopted, quitewithout design, they led off into the same weird bypaths. For instance,Italy before World War I had already learned how to increasethe charges of social security in order to provide the governmentwith money, not for social security but for its regular expenditures,and the same thing appeared in Germany. The present administrationdid that here until it was stopped by Congress in 1938,and now it is energetically trying to do the same thing again. Recentlythe New York Sun reported that when auditors got into thebooks of Mussolini's treasury, after his fall, they discovered that alarge part of his deficit was due to the paying out of huge sums insubsidies to conceal the rise in the cost of living—a plan industriouslyurged here by the Hansen group and adopted by the Presidentbut as yet resisted by Congress. It is a singular fact that atJ8J