Those who after World War I were calling for a rapid return to private finance were arguing ‘by analogy . . . that a comparable system between governments’ could be made a ‘permanent order of society’, this despite the fact that the war had left obligations that were ‘far vaster’ and of ‘definitely oppressive scale’. These debts corresponded in daily life to ‘no real assets’ and were unrelated in any direct way to the system of private property. To attempt an immediate return to laissez-faire liberalism was both unrealistic and dangerous.
