Borrow and Grow Rich

A quarter of my council tax goes to pay the pensions of the former
council tax workers, and thank goodness for it. Without such payments those
pensioners would have no money to spend; and if they (and many others like
them) had no money to spend, demand in the economy would decline
catastrophically.
It follows, then, that the solution to our economic problems is to pay
those pensioners (and the others like them) more, even much more, because
then they would spend more, there would be more demand in the economy,
employment would grow and we should all be better off. Far from being the
dismal science, then, political economy, when properly practised, is the gayest
of all sciences. It teaches Man how to have something for almost nothing, and
there can be no prospect more cheering than that.
Of course, there are naysayers as always. They pretend that the happy
scheme of simply paying ourselves more so that we become ever richer
cannot go on, that ultimately it will collapse and that, if we want to be richer,
we shall have to knuckle down and produce more and pay ourselves what we
earn rather than what we would like. But they entirely mistake the real
source of wealth, namely the printing press (for more money) and borrowing.
These are the economic equivalent of nuclear fusion, and they have already
been found to work.
Back in the 1930s, an American nutritionist and naturopath, Gayelord
Hauser, wrote a book with the title Eat and Grow Beautiful. It is time a
political economist wrote a book with the title Spend and Grow Rich. It will
be necessary for him to destroy the common and vulgar illusion that what you
spend money on is of importance: it is the act of spending that is important.
Thank goodness we once had a Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown,
who understood this and also that the supposed distinction between
investment and expenditure is a bogus one because all expenditure is by
definition investment. This is because all expenditure has a multiplier effect,
so that all of it has an economic return.
This is the time, then, that we should be borrowing more. Interest rates
are low, and interest on the public debt is only a few paltry billions more than
expenditure on the defence of the realm. Let us, then, borrow and grow rich.
We have nothing to fear but prudence itself.