ABSTRACT
In fact, this is the Gordian knot of political economy, and there is only one way of dealing with it.
" Mechanism" is a misnomer when applied to our present commercial, trading, banking, and financial arrangements. Such " mechanism " is far from being, as it might and would be in a properly organized community, well-designed, effective and smoothly working, with its movements easily followed ; it is a tangle that cannot be unravelled even by the most expert minds. For some generations political economists have been engaged in the work, and they are as far off as ever from the solution of the problems of the " dismal science " connected with money and exchange ; trying to evolve order out of the chaotic welter of individual interests and actions is worse than trying to square the circle or to discover perpetual motion. Economists accordingly are far from being unanimous in their theories of value, credit, currency, and international trade ; nor can they show how financial and commercial crises, bankruptcies, industrial depressions, unemployment, low wages, due so often to the present clumsy and ineffective " mechanism " of exchange, can be prevented in their individualist system. Practical men, too, bankers and financiers, those who have the handling and management of
the money and the credit of the world, are unable owing to the intricacies of the capitalist system to solve the problems involved, even had they the best intentions. The economic results of their blundering and muddling are too often appallingly disastrous.
