Back to Reflation The letter on monetary expansion, signed by
thirty-seven economists in . The Times last Friday, is symbolic of a trend of ideas that is making striking . headway. Mr. Keynes' articles in the same journal, of course, point even more emphatically in the same direction, while The Times itself has been astonishing the more staid of its supporters by its advocacy of a deliberately unhalanced Budget. The discussion is at any rate bringing out the Aistinction between improvised relief works, whose disastrous extravagance experience has abundantly demonstrated, and the encouragement of normal business enterprise, particularly in such matters as housing, fostered by a judicious uset, of Government credit. Whether the thirty-seven are right in suggesting that the Budget should be presented in two chapters, one covering current expenditure, and the other 'expenditure on capital account, is a secondary question, but their letter, at any rate, is a wholesome corrective of the idle-men-and-idle-money policy.
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