[발췌: D. Ritschel's] The Politics of Planning: The Debate on Economic Planning in Britain in the 1930s

출처: The Politics of Planning: The Debate on Economic Planning in Britain in the 1930s

지은이: Daniel Ritschel (Oxford University Press, 1997)

자료: 구글도서

※ 발췌(excerpts):

( ... ... ) Obviously, the economics of high wages tool Mosley quite a few steps 'beyond Keynes'. Nevertheless, it can still be argued that his position was broadly Keynesian. After all, Keynes also stressed the importance of demand, criticised the idea of wage reductions as an answer to Britain's export difficulties, and, as Skidelsky notes, would soon himself urge that Britain should go 'homespun'.[57] The full distance Mosley travelled 'beyond Keynes' can only be properly measured in the contrast between their interpretations of what Keynes called the 'new agenda' of the modern state which followed from their respective analyses.

Keynes was certainly one of the more outspoken advocates of state intervention in the 1920s. He criticized 'the economic autarchy of individualistic capitalism', questioned the orthodox claim that the market economy was self-adjusting, and suggested that society would have to exercise a measure of 'collective control' over its faulty mechanism. Frequently, his diagnosis of 'the end of ^laissez-faire^' implied that the breakdown of the free-market economy was irreversible. Many of the economic decisions which had hitherto been left to 'individuals or to chance', he argued, would in the future become 'the subject of deliberate state policy and centralized state control'.[58] Amongst the new functions of the state he particularly emphasized monetary management, including a flexible bank-rate policy, regulation of capital outflows overseas, and, if necessary, direct public investment. The last was, of course, the most radical of the 'new agenda' of his state, meant to restore a satisfactory level of industrial activity and employment.

Yet radical as this prescription may have been, it by no means implied advocacy of permanent state intervention. Indeed, until at least the mid-1930s, Keynes viewed state investment as but a temporary expedient, made necessary only by exceptional depth of the post-war depression and the structural constraints imposed upon the traditional monetary mechanism by the return to gold, and meant to start a 'cumulative wave of prosperity' which would break the entrenched mood of business pessimism and restore private demand for labour and capital.[59] The 'new agenda' of the state was thus to be a short-lived and carefully circumscribed affair. As he told the Macmillan Committee:

We must look to a bold Government progamme to lift us out of the rut, and if that is done, if it has the effect of restoring business profits, then the machine of private enterprise might enable the economic system to proceed once more under its own steam and since I should look forward to that, I also look forward to being able gradually to diminish the amount of Government intervention.[60]

[60] ^Collected Writings of Keynes^ vol: 20 (1981), p. 147.

Keynes thus breached the accepted pattern of governmental economic functions, but remained safely within the limits of free-market capitalism. Mosley was not satisfied with such an answer. His underconsumptionist perspective and his pessimistic prognosis about Britain's future export prospects both clearly indicated that the economic problem was essentially a structural one, requiring far deeper correctives than mere monetary stimulants. 'The root cause of the present crisis is the industrial position,' he explained in 1931. 'No tinkering financial expedients can meet it unless a constructive policy is adopted to meet te industrial crisis.'[61] Certainly his answer went considerably beyond any financial 'tinkering'. The idea of a high-wage economy alone would have involved a profound revision of the existing economic order. His additional conclusion that this economy would have to be tightly 'insulated' and that British industry be redirected to production for the new domestic market amounted to, as Mosley himself put it, 'an enterprise which means nothing less than the reorganisation of the whole basis of the industrial life of the country.'[62] This enterprise was to be achieved not by indirect monetary management, but by the ^dirigiste^ strategy of 'national planning'.

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