National Economic Independence in the Light of the International Economic Conference

The wave of exaggerated nationalism which has pervaded the nations of the earth generally since the World War has been accompanied by seemingly serious efforts on the part of national governments to arrange for the production within their territorial limits of as many as possible of the articles which their peoples consume, often quite heedless of the cost of home as compared with external production. Such disregard of economic laws could scarcely have failed to aggravate the poverty in which the world was inevitably left in the wake of the war. Political leaders have seemed wholly unmindful of the essential truth of economics, namely, that destruction and waste, the accompaniments of war, cannot be indulged in without a lowering of economic standards, that those standards can only be raised by production, and that recovery is accomplished in the measure that production is achieved at the place and by the methods which make possible the largest output of consumable goods in proportion to the labor and raw material involved.