The Economic Emergency In 2020 and Beyond Won’t Be Covid | RealClearMarkets
Though failing as a politician (running for Mayor of New York City twice, he lost both times but managed more votes than a young Theodore Roosevelt in the 1886 election), George remained a widely celebrated and prolific writer. Summing up his views in an article published in the magazine Once A Week, in March 1894, just as another even more terrible depression had been unleashed, he said:
So the first step toward determining the causes of business depression is to see what business depression really is. By business depression we mean a lessening in rapidity and volume of the exchanges by which, in our highly specialized industrial system, commodities pass into the hands of consumers. This lessening of exchanges, which from the side of the merchant or manufacturer we call business depression, is evidently not due to any scarcity of the things that merchants or manufacturers have to exchange. From that point of view there seems, indeed, a plethora of such things. Nor is it due to any lessening in the desire of consumers for them. On the contrary, seasons of business depression are seasons of bitter want on the part of large numbers, of want so intense and general that charity is called on to prevent actual starvation from need of things that manufacturers and merchants have to sell.