ABSTRACT
The onus of proof is plainly on those who maintain that evils are necessary. Certain immediate difficulties, however, confront anyone who tries to make such an examination. For the modern economic system is not a simple mechanism which one can inspect, as one would inspect a factory, by seeing each department in turn until there is none left to see. The economic and monetary aspects of the mechanism can only be clearly differentiated as the nature of the whole becomes apparent. Each single incident in the process—the buying of a bar of chocolate by a child—has an economic and monetary aspect, and the concrete incident is only explicable as the effect of two causes working as it were on different planes: rather as every human act is perhaps the consequence of a mechanical and a rational set of causes. It follows that any given concrete fault in the process may have had a monetary or an economic cause, or both.
