Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/17

mony to this paradoxical situation is the general acceptance in this country of the view that, for the present at any rate, there is not enough world market for both Germany and us to buy the numerous manufactured goods we are both equipped to produce.

This conviction is already operating so powerfully upon business men and politicians, irrespective of party attachment, as to induce them to regard the payment of German reparations upon the scale imposed as gravely detrimental to the recovery of British trade. Even free traders, whose policy is rooted in the conviction that too much production is impossible, because all goods produced must exchange against one another and pass into consumption, are found expressing their alarm lest, under the pressure of the reparation demand and the depreciated exchange, Germany should monopolise the market of the world in staple manufactures.

Everywhere we find the confident acceptance of a belief in a limited market, incapable of such expansion as to take off all we can produce. Some, indeed, profess to believe that, by reducing wages and so lowering costs and selling prices, the existing surplus stocks could be marketed and production carried on. But these generally mean that by this economy we could get some of the orders which at present go to Germany, or to Belgium, or some other competitor, thus throwing some of our unemployment on to another country. If they mean more than this, viz. that the practice in this country of a sweating system like that impossed on Germany (by the pursuance of inflation) would enable us, and other