money, liberty, credit, crisis

John Weeks has three great quotes on his home page which sums up the spirit of our times:

"When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall…dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession…will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease ..." [J M Keynes, ‘The Future’, Essays in Persuasion 1931]

"Unhappy events…have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group" [Franklin D Roosevelt, message to the US Congress 1938]

"In a system of production, where the entire continuity of the reproduction process rests upon credit, a crisis must obviously occur — a tremendous rush for means of payment — when credit suddenly ceases and only cash payments have validity" [Karl Marx, Capital III, p 490]