The question of public finance and national income is also discussed. Enormous increases in government expenditure occurred in the United States in the effort to combat domestic problems of distribution, but chief interest perhaps now centres on the preliminary expenditures by the chief protagonists in the European conflict, notably Germany, France and the' United Kingdom. Rearmament expenditure is given close study, and the revelations are somewhat shocking, though modest compared with military preparations now openly avowed. The development of social expenditure, cost of unemployment and public works, with the severe consequences on public debt, are carefully examined, and everywhere is shown the inexorable trend that bred Fascism, ie, the making of the State the chief dispenser of wealth, public organization followed up by greater state control with greater state responsibility.
State expenditure, by its growth to telling proportions, brought consequences o the supply of money and the capital markets. In factual manner the monetary policies of certain industrial countries are discussed, notably the Reich and Italy as against the "free" economies of France, Britain and the United States, and also the monetary policies of certain agricultural countries, The United States' agricultural "planned economy" is sketched without comment, but the obvious inference is disquieting in its severe restrictions rather than better distributive trends.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.