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this moment the battle against inflation is in the hands of thesePerpetual Debt economists who look upon government spending andborrowing—which are the cause of inflation—as things good andnecessary, and who look upon the objections to huge governmentspending and deficits as "old-fashioned superstition."How the funds will be spent or "invested" by the central governmentis a point upon which all the advocates of this system are by nomeans agreed. Generally they fall into three groups:1. The first group insists that the government shall not engagein any activities that either compete with private industry or impingeon its province. The government should put out its fundsupon projects outside the domain of the profit system—such aspublic roads, schools, eleemosynary institutions, playgrounds, publicparks, health projects, recreational and cultural activities of allsorts. A possible exception might be the development of poweracross state boundaries. Another exception would be public housingor housing for the underprivileged, which would not actually competewith private industry since private investors never put anymoney into housing projects of this kind. They would leave thewhole subject of producing and distributing goods to private enterprises.2. Another group proposes to invest these government funds inthe shares and bonds of private enterprises. An eligible list of publicinvestments would be established. The government would thus becomethe chief investor in private enterprise and in some cases—the railroads, for instance—the government might own all thebonds and perhaps much of the stock. Thus we would have a privatecorporation operating the utility in which much if not most of thefunds would belong to the government. This plan, of course, wouldenable the general government, as the largest stockholder or holderof the mortgage, to exercise over properties a whole range ofauthority and power which it could not possibly exercise as a governmentper se.3. A third plan is outlined by Mr. Mordecai Ezekiel, economicadviser of the Agricultural Department. He proposes an IndustrialAdjustment Administration patterned on the lines of the AgriculturalAdjustment Administration. It would work as follows: Indusi8¿

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