This Age of Fable Quotes

“...maintaining consumption at a certain level does not supply work and income for those who have to make their living in industries of so-called capital goods, except for the minimum required for the physical replacement of obsolescent and worn out equipment.
Mass unemployment never originates in a letdown of consumption. Mass unemployment originates in a decline of investment, that is, when an industrial economy ceases to grow and expand. The more heavily industrialized a country is, the greater is the proportion of the people employed (directly or indirectly) in capital goods industries.”
― Gustav Stolper, This Age of Fable: The Political and Economic World We Live In

“Infinite misery would have been spared the world had it realized in time that a socialist order--and National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy never were anything but socialist orders, all Marxist diatribes to the contrary notwithstanding--by necessity must encroach upon the remotest abodes of private life, must become and remain totalitarian in the most literal sense of the word. The dictator determines the ends and therefore he must determine the means.”
― Gustav Stolper, This Age of Fable: The Political and Economic World We Live In

“The supreme source of economic power, the real dictator in a capitalist economy, is the consumer. He, and he alone, decides what and how much shall be produced, how it shall be distributed, at what price and quality it must be made available to satisfy him.”
― Gustav Stolper, This Age of Fable: The Political and Economic World We Live In

“Compared with the era before the League of Nations, the international world before 1914 was a paradise of orderly, peaceful, steadily intensifying international relations. The much deplored pre-1914 secret diplomacy settled peacefully ten times more conflicts than the machinery of the League was capable of settling.
The three fundamental freedoms on which that world was built--freedom of movement for men, goods, and money--destroyed by the war, were never restored.”
― Gustav Stolper, This Age of Fable: The Political and Economic World We Live In

“If we want to understand the crisis that has engulfed laissez-faire liberalism all over the world, we must grasp the phenomenon in its full meaning. The laissez-faire philosophy is in irreconcilable conflict with the restless activist mental attitude characteristic of our age. Modern social consciousness finds it intolerable to let things go as they please in the political and economic spheres. It is insufferable to face social and economic problems with passive resignation while in all other spheres we assume that we must grapple with any problem systematically and in full confidence of eventual success.”
― Gustav Stolper, This Age of Fable: The Political and Economic World We Live In

“The war had democratized the world in a wholly unforeseen and unintended way. Since the war could be conducted only by complete mobilization of the whole people and all their resources, the whole people was called upon for the first time in history to participate in public life. Almost everywhere the franchise was vastly extended. The age limit was reduced, women were enfranchised. Overnight the pre-1914 voting population was turned into a minority as against the new voters...These new masses had a new position vis-à-vis the government and state, a different idea of the power and purpose of government, a different attitude toward money, budgets, social rights, and privileges.”
― Gustav Stolper, This Age of Fable: The Political and Economic World We Live In

“Before 1914, in the minds of the Western World governments had to see to it that law and order were preserved and that the security of their nations was protected. Beyond that they were not supposed to reach. When in 1918 mankind slowly emerged from the nightmare of the war, governments all over the world were interfering in all manner of ways in the life of their citizens, were assuming new tasks, forging new instruments, amassing new powers, shouldering new responsibilities.”
― Gustav Stolper, This Age of Fable: The Political and Economic World We Live In