On the eve of World War II, Keynes delivered the following chilling address on the BBC, talking about the “great experiment” of curing unemployment through war expenditure:
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Two years later to the day, in a lecture delivered shortly after his arrival in the U.S., Mises described how the great experiment really looked like:
We are witnesses to the most frightful and phenomenal occurrence in human history: the decay of Western civilization. London, one of the centers of this civilization... is almost completely destroyed. The buildings of the Parliament of Westminster are in ruins; the House of Commons holds its assemblies in the catacombs. [...] The theater of war is spreading, and the day seems not distant when peace will have lost its last refuge. It is a moral and material collapse without precedent.
