HKB
even come when the United States will refuse gold, yet still demand to be paid,—a new Midas vainly asking more succulent fare than the barren metal of her own contract.
In any case the readjustment will be severe, and injurious to important interests. If, in addition, the United States exacts payment of the Allied debts, the position will be intolerable. If she persevered to the bitter end, scrapped her export industries and diverted to other uses the capital now employed in them, and if her former European associates decided to meet their obligations at whatever cost to themselves, I do not deny that the final result might be to America’s material interest. But the project is utterly chimerical. It will not happen. Nothing is more certain than that America will not pursue such a policy to its conclusion; she will abandon it as soon as she experiences its first consequences. Nor, if she did, would the Allies pay the money. The position is exactly parallel to that of German Reparation. America will not carry through to a conclusion the collection of Allied debt, any more than the Allies will carry through the collection of their present Reparation demands. Neither, in the long run, is serious politics. Nearly all well–informed persons admit this in private conversation. But we live in a curious age when utterances in the press are deliberately designed to be in conformity with the worst–informed, instead of with the best–informed, opinion, because the former is the wider spread; so that for comparatively long periods there can be discrepancies, laughable or monstrous, between the written and the spoken word.
If this is so, it is not good business for America to embitter her relations with Europe, and to disorder her export industries for two years, in pursuance of a policy which she is certain to abandon before it has profited her.
For the benefit of any reader who enjoys an abstract statement, I summarize the argument thus. The equilibrium of international trade is based on a complicated balance between the agriculture and the industries of the different countries of the world, and on a specialization by each in the employment of its labor and its capital. If one country is required to transfer to another without payment great quantities of goods, for which this equilibrium does not allow, the balance is destroyed. Since capital and labor are fixed and organized in certain employments and cannot flow freely into others, the disturbance of the balance is destructive to the utility of the capital and labor thus fixed. The organization, on which the wealth of the modern world so largely depends, suffers injury. In course of time a new organization and a new equilibrium can be established. But if the origin of the disturbance is of temporary duration, the losses from the injury done to organization may outweigh the profit of receiving goods without paying for them. Moreover, since the losses will be concentrated on the capital and labor employed in particular industries, they will provoke an outcry out of proportion to the injury inflicted on the community as a whole.
FOOTNOTE:
[110] In the year of boom to June 1920, on a total trade of $13,350 millions, the excess of exports over imports was $2870 millions. In the year, partly one of depression, to June 1921, on a total trade of $10,150 millions, the excess of exports was $2860 millions.