Читать книгу Economics and the Public Welfare - Benjamin M. Anderson - Страница 24
Оглавление[print edition page 112]
French Prewar and Wartime Deficits. We turn now to the parallel story of the financial developments in France during the period when Germany was sinking so rapidly. France entered the war with bad government finances. She had a national debt of 30 billion gold francs as against an estimated national wealth of 300 billion gold francs at the beginning of the war. France had had chronic deficits for many years before the war. There was governmental extravagance, and there was a great reluctance on the part of the people to submit to direct taxes. They did tolerate very heavy indirect taxes. When Caillaux undertook early in 1914 to introduce an income tax of 2 percent in the effort to balance the French budget, the outcry in France was so extreme that one would have supposed that the end of the world had come. During the war France did relatively little with taxation, and the public debt ran up from 30 billion to 147 billion francs before the war was over.
French Postwar Deficits. Then France began to have some real deficits. Adherents of the school of Keynes and Hansen would do well to study the history of French finance from 1918 to 1926. The one difference between the policies followed in France in this period and the policies advocated by the New Deal spenders for the United States is to be found in the fact that the French were ashamed of it and tried to conceal it and to find excuses for it, whereas the New Deal spenders would glorify it and call it “investment.”
Exact facts regarding the French budget and the total of French expenditures were very difficult to obtain in the period following the war. Expenditures were concealed under a multitude of rubrics.1
[print edition page 113]
The point was that French financial accounting dealt not only with “the budget,” which could easily be balanced by making it equal the taxes, but also the “special budget recoverable” (from Germany), the “special budget” (not recoverable), the “annexed budgets,” and the “special accounts.” When all these were taken together the French figures ran approximately as follows:2
FRENCH GOVERNMENT POSTWAR DEFICITS
(In millions of francs)
| 1919 | 1920 | 1921 | 1922 | 1923 | 1924 | |
| Expenditures | 54,956 | 57,501 | 46,492 | 37,929 | 37,944 | 41,214 |
| Revenues | 8,221 | 15,469 | 18,511 | 19,014 | 21,307 | 27,083 |
| Deficit | 46,735 | 42,032 | 27,981 | 18,915 | 16,637 | 14,131 |
“Reparations” Actually Paid by French. France wanted reparations, and the term reparations had a very real meaning to the French people. Here were the devastated northern provinces, and they wanted them repaired. The Germans were obligated under the treaty to repair them. When German payments were insufficient for the purpose, the French government anticipated them, borrowing to set the work going to restore the devastation. When critics of French financial policy pointed out how inadequate the taxation was in relation to the vast expenditures, the answer was, “The Boche will pay”; and when year after year the German payments were disappointingly small, the declamation changed from the indicative to the imperative mood, and the answer was, “The Boche must pay.”
Weak and Short-lived Ministries Afraid to Face Financial Facts. The French financial fabric was crumbling. Weak ministry succeeded weak ministry, each too much afraid of its own tenure of office to venture to tell the financial truth to the people, each holding onto office a few weeks longer, concealing the facts and waiting for the next ministry to tell the truth to the people. The franc slipped ominously in the foreign exchanges. A hectic inflation came in France. A financially collapsing Germany was blamed for the financial troubles of France, and the French Army moved in and occupied the Ruhr. This was on January 11, 1923. French economic evacuation of the Ruhr came November 15, 1923, and military evacuation July 1925.
Occupation of Ruhr Harmed Both Germany and France. The occupation of the Ruhr involved financial burdens rather than financial gains for France. It was demoralizing in the extreme to German industry and finance, both in the occupied and the unoccupied territory. Ordinary trade processes were dislocated. Military decisions were substituted for business contracts. The normal course of trade was interrupted. For example,
[print edition page 114]
shipments of coal from the Ruhr to East Prussia in cars which would have returned from East Prussia loaded with potatoes for Ruhr consumption—usual at the season when the occupation first began—were promptly stopped. France got very little coal and coke from the Ruhr compared with what she had been getting before the occupation. Unoccupied Germany likewise was unable to get coal in any quantity from the Ruhr and many of her industries were consequently in a precarious position. France experienced heavy losses and Germany’s abilities to make reparations payments were gravely impaired.
In the holding of part of Germany by armies of occupation under the terms of the peace treaty, the Allies had sought “guaranties” that Germany would perform her obligations under the treaty. In the seizing of the Ruhr, France sought in addition a “productive guaranty.” But the whole theory of guaranties and productive guaranties proved abortive. If Germany were to pay she must be put in a position of economic strength and not in a position of humiliating helplessness. Or at least so it seemed to us in that benighted time. We were not prepared in 1923 and 1924 to adopt the ideals and methods of Hitler, to occupy all of Germany, to turn the Germans into slaves, and to extract from an enslaved people by terroristic methods all their surplus over a bare subsistence. We turned to methods that were more humane, to methods designed to make it to the interest of Germany to pay what she could, and to methods designed to permit Germany and her conquerors to share in an expanding and productive economic life.
