Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/85

it in increased effective demand for commodities, thus clearing off any gluts of goods still congesting the industrial system and enabling fresh flows of raw materials to pass into the productive processes. The future increase of general productivity which these public works would yield would, when matured, not contribute to bring about another glut, provided the profits or rents they 5delded were kept in public hands and used for health, education, recreation, and other non-competitive purposes.

Long-term credits, for financing export trade, with countries whose broken productive and financial resources disable them from exercising effective demand for our goods through the usual channels, could also be brought into accord with sound policy. Austria, Poland, Russia, let us say, are in need of steam engines and ploughs to revive their agriculture and transport, but cannot pay for them at present in money or goods. If they were given, on the Ter Meulen or some other plan, credits long enough to enable them to buy these engines and ploughs from us as soon as we could deliver them, but to postpone payment for them in actual goods until their use had time to fructify in exportable grain, timber, sugar, and other goods, the direct effect of this use of credits would be to stimulate employment in our engineering and connected trades, and to alter the proportion of monetary incomes here so as to increase effective demands for commodities in general. The later flow of return-goods into this country would be of a nature not to compete directly with our own product to any appreciable degree, and if postponed, as is likely, until depression