Why is it that our industrialists, who are responsible for the welfare of industry, have allowed a financial policy to be pursued which has been so damaging to it, and not only damaging to the working people involved in the industry, but to the industrialists themselves?
They all of them put their money on the side of Conservatism politically, and voted with the big battalions of Conservatism, while Conservative Governments were putting through quite steadily, from 1922 onwards till last year, a monetary policy which was hitting industry and the industrialists all the time, though they did not seem to see it. They complained, of course, from time to time.
Even Mr Churchill claims now that he was all in favour of a monetary policy which would take into consideration the welfare of industry and not look only at the position from the point of view of high finance and the City. But it was Mr Churchill who put through the return to the Gold Standard all the same. One might say of Mr Churchill what Frederick the Great said of the Empress Maria Theresa, when she took part in the partition of Poland: “He wept, but he took.”
What did he take? Maynard Keynes states that the primary consequence of the return to the Gold Standard was to place £1,000,000,000 into the pockets of the rentier interest, a purely debt holding interest, out of our pockets…A L Rowse, Fabian Society Lecture (1932)
What is different? Only some of the jargon. Periodically, the über rich simply rob us of the odd $trillion or so at current values. Why do we put up with it?
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