ry to provide all
that is needed."

This argument is simply the embodiment of the old delusion, so common
among people who handle the machinery of finance, that you can really
increase the supply of necessary goods by increasing the supply of
money, which is nothing else than claims to goods expressed either in
pieces of metal or pieces of paper. As we have seen, all that we have
been able to raise abroad has been required for advances to our Allies
and Dominions, consequently we have had to fall back upon our own home
production for everything needed for our own war costs. Either we have
turned out the goods at home or we have turned out goods to sell to
foreigners in exchange for goods that we require from them. But since
we thus had to rely on home production for the whole of the war's
needs as far as we were concerned, it is clear that the Government
could, if it had been gifted with ideal courage and devotion, and if
it had a people behind it ready to do all that was needed for victory,
have taken the whole of the home production, except what was wanted
for maintaining the civilian population in efficiency, for the
purposes of the war.

It is a commonplace of political theory that the Government has a
right to take the whole of the property and the whole of the labour of
its citizens. But it would not, of course, have been possible for the
Government immediately to inaugurate a policy of setting everybody to
work on things required for the war and paying them all a maintenance
wage. This might have been done in theory, but in practice it would
have involved questions of industrial conscription, which would
probably have raised a storm of difficulty. What the Government might
have done would have been by commandeering the buying power of the
citizen to have set free the whole industrial energy of the community
for supplying the war's needs and the necessaries of life. At present
the national output, which is only another way of expressing the
national income, is produced from certain channels of production in
response to the expectation of demand from those whose possession of
claims to goods, that is to say, money, gives them the right to say
what kind of goods they will consume, and consequently the industrial
part of the population will produce.

Had the Government laid down that the whole cost of the war was to be
borne by taxation, the effect of this measure would have been that
everything which was needed