THE LAST COLUMN
The Editor Reserves The Last Column WHERE is the money coming from? Where is the money coming from to service and amortize the fantastic war debt we are accumulating? Where is the money coming...
...is no definitive blue-print for the future, and, of course, it doesn't pretend to be...
...This is the question which makes conservative Congressmen tremble when they are asked to plan for postwar reconstruction...
...Some of the critics will doubtless haggle over some of its phrases and clauses, but I hope that in the process they won't miss the larger meaning of this compelling little volume...
...Chase invites you to examine the internal economies of the warring powers, especially a "bankrupt" nation like Germany which was able to build a diabolically efficient military machine and overrun almost the entire continent of Europe (before American production was brought into play) because Germany was the first highly industrialized nation on earth to release technology from the shackles of private finance...
...Chase answers the question anew out of the experience forged in the furnace of war, in his recently published book, Where Is The Money Coming From...
...He moves on to advocacy of an economic way of life for postwar America—a "compensatory economy" where businessmen largely own and operate the means of production, "but where government underwrites full employment by its control of existing financial machinery...
...And yet the answer to this question is being shouted above the roar of battle and the din of war plants in every warring country on earth, even more loudly, perhaps, in "bankrupt" Germany and "bankrupt" Japan than in fabulously wealthy America...
...M.H.R...
...Stuart Chase has sounded a bold and hopeful note—not a hope based on wishful thinking, but a hope based on the realistic appreciation of the simple fact that money comes from putting men and machines to work...
...It is published by the 20th Century Fund as part of the widely discussed series of six volumes, under the general heading "When The War Ends," which the Fund commissioned Chase to write...
...The outlook from the physical standpoint is clear and hopeful...
...The state is the underwriter, not the operator...
...If we recognize this basic fact and refuse to be intimidated by the quaking "Where Is the Money Coming From...
...What it needs to become a functioning social and economic program is a will to action and the realization, (and this is Chase's basic theme,) that "What is physically possible is financially possible...
...Money Is Dynamic People who let that question get them down, Chase writes, "find it difficult to grasp the newer concepts, where money is dynamic, like an electric current, not static like a ton of pig iron...
...Among them is Stuart Chase to whom the shouted answer must sound like an echo—an echo of his own clear analysis presented recurringly for more than a decade before the war...
...Where is the money coming from to finance mustering-out pay for 10,000,000 American boys when the war ends ? Where is the money coming from to pay for a postwar public works program and for a greatly expanded system of social security...
...No layman who is looking beyond the destruction of war to the reconstruction of peace can afford to miss this crisply written answer to that omnipresent question, "Where Is the Money Coming From...
...This is the question which terrorizes many Americans into contemplating the future with despair...
...This compensatory, or mixed, economy, is presented as "a working compromise between 'present principles' and totalitarian rigors...
...This is the physical scene...
...But Chase is concerned with the wartime truths about finance only as they help us understand the limitless possibilities which lie before us in peace if we have the imagination and the courage to break with the past...
...Where Is The Money Coming From...
...Unless the war lasts beyond limits not now imagined, we shall have all the physical requisites for building a great, expanding civilization in America, while helping the rest of the world to its feet...
...gang, we can still win'the peace...
...For all their monstrous theories in almost every other field of human endeavor, the Nazi leaders grasped a basic truth which gave them an almost decisive superiority over the nations chained to the past—the realization that Germany (or any other nation) can "afford" anything that her human skills and natural resources permit...
...Government The Underwriter Chase has some lively chapters devoted to the operation of our system of money and credit, the problems presented by the growing national debt, and a number of other closely related topics...
...Looking to the day when the war ends, Chase sees: "There stand the workers, the tools, and the raw materials to work with and the tasks to be done...
...Many an alert and thoughtful American who isn't afraid of tomorrow has been listening to that answer...
Vol. 8 • January 1944 • No. 2
