Of course we didn't know how distinguished we were. We didn't know that others were to get the Nobel Prize and not share it with us for the monetaris… - Enoch Powell
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Of course we didn't know how distinguished we were. We didn't know that others were to get the Nobel Prize and not share it with us for the monetarist theory. But, of course, men are not primarily activated by economic motives and I have always therefore assigned free economics a place only, a subordinate place, inside the whole of politics. And, in speech after speech to my countrymen, I've said: "Now, if you don't care for this or that, then that's your choice. Go your ways, but if what you are wanting is this or that economic result, then this is the way to get it." But I have never regarded economics as other than subordinate in the scale of values and, in recent years, and particularly vis-à-vis this government, which I think is sometimes too materialistic, too ready to establish what it calls competitive criteria.
John Enoch Powell (16 June 1912 – 8 February 1998) was a British politician, classical scholar, author, linguist, soldier, philologist, and poet. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament (1950–1974), then Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP (1974–1987), and was Minister of Health (1960–1963).
Wages, profits, prices are determined, always have been determined, and always will be determined until we go Communist, by the market—by supply and demand working through the market. While we tie ourselves into knots trying to invent non-market criteria for our commissions to use, the market is there, noiselessly, efficiently, irresistibly doing the job for us all the time. Irresistibly—yes, and there's the rub. For there is one thing outside the market in a modern economy, and that is money itself. Governments can and do satisfy the demand for money, raise and lower the supply of money. In short, governments have the power to control money, which is so largely their own creation. If governments allow monetary demand to increase faster than productivity, the market will not stop the process, because it cannot stop it. The market will simply go on determining wages, profits and prices in ever higher monetary terms—until something busts.
England alone found the way to transmute its feudal assembly into a matchless instrument of free government, which the rest of the world vainly aspire to imitate.
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The monetary belief, or the monetary myth, upon which a whole generation has been reared—that an injection of money into the system is the automatic cure for unemployment—has collapsed in the face of the experience of the past four or five years.
