In this study we shall try to answer the question whether and to what extent the policy of public spending has helped to bring about recovery in the United States. Before this depression, economists developed the theory of 'priming the pump' as a device for overcoming depressions.
More than once within the last two decades the plight of the farmer has been the main concern of nearly every government. When war raged, European farming, as the source of national food supplies, was subject to the utmost care, aid and regulation in all the countries afflicted by the war. Later on, while European farming revived slowly, American farming passed the trough of postwar depression; and again, from 1928 on, when prices of agricultural prime products collapsed to hitherto unknown depths, agriculture became the worry of governments the world over.
At present I shall not enter more thoroughly into the debate on this basic political problem, but shall restrict myself to the secondary question of how the civil service might be improved if it ought to be. As a working hypothesis I assume that a growing number of positions will be reserved for the nonpartisan service, and further, that a good civil service would not necessarily be the master of the state and could effectively be prevented from becoming such.
The name is newly coined, but its significance carries back to the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. Fascism re-inaugurated and defined the totalitarian state: 'Nothing outside or above the state, nothing against the state, everything within the state, everything for the state.' Formulae apart, there have been similar conceptions in the past, both in theory and in practice. Leviathan has two and a half centuries of history.
I may say that the question of technical difficulties had originally been, with me, the only source of misgiving as to the practicability of 100 percent money. Even in the first edition of my 100 percent Money it was, as Professor Angell points out, the weakest part. But now we have a choice of many different practical methods for introducing 100 percent money. After reading Mr. Lehmann's article, I felt that he had really strengthened the case for 100 percent money intellectually, despite his emotional attitude of damning it with faint praise.
There are three points in Professor Fisher's comments on my article '100% Money' to which I wish to reply, partly to declare my full agreement with Professor Fisher, partly to show where to my mind our differences lie.
Review of book by Harold G. Moulton. Washington: Brookings Institution. 1935. 207 pp.
Review of book by Harold G. Moulton. Washington: Brookings Institution. 1935. 191 pp.
Review of book by Leonard D. White, Charles H. Bland, Walter R. Sharp, and Fritz Morstein. Commission of Inquiry on Public Service Personnel, Monographs 2 to 5. New York: McGraw-Hill. 1935. 275 pp.
Review of book by Werner Jaeger.Translated with the author's corrections and additions by Richard Robinson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1934.
Review of book by Koppel S. Pinson with foreword by Carlton J.H. Hayes. New York: Columbia University Press. 1935. 71 pp.