James Goldsmith Quotes
We (British) have reached the state where the private sector is that part of the economy the government controls and the public sector is that part that nobody controls.
Goldsmith, James. Quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations, edited by Antony Jay, 3rd ed., Oxford UP, 2006.
He was discussion the role of the media in terms of psychological national security in the wake of the September 11 attack.
This quotation illustrates one of White’s correct early grasps of what was happening in the political economy of the time and its future direction with growing industrialization and technological complexity. Most historians agree that White passed classified information to the Russians. He was accused of being a Communist, but there was never any evidence of that. Some people believe that he was a spy for the Russians and committed espionage, but others disagree observing that White was very much his own man and felt that much information that was classified never should have been. White substituted his own judgment, it is believed, about what could be given to the Russians for the security system. He was an admirer of what Russian socialism had accomplished economically, educationally and medically since the 1917 revolution deposing the Czar. Russia had been a valuable military ally, which had taken the brunt of both military and civilian casualties in WWII. White’s economics were certainly not Marxist but very much Keynesian. He was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee where he was accused of being a Communist which he denied (see {634907}). He died of a heart attack 3 days later.
At the time extreme socialist doctrine was that the state should own the factories and the other means of industrial production. The socialists believed that the people through their government had to be able to control the economy and the private owners’ greed would always drive the economy for themselves and not for the society in general. Deal was one of the first who argued that there were other, less draconian modes of economic control like government regulation and central banks. Deat turned traitor during WWII and served in the Vichy Nazi cabinet of Pierre Laval. He was sentenced to death for treason but escaped to Italy where he assumed a new identity and then was sheltered by a right-wing Catholic religious order in the convent of San Vito, near Turin, where he wrote his memoirs and lived undiscovered until his death.
To the modern reader utterances such as this from a Conservative Prime Minister seem astounding. However, the Great Depression existed in Canada as well as the United States, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not the only world leader who would reach the conclusion that business and capitalism must be profoundly regulated and the system changed if it was to be saved.
Sir James Michael Goldsmith was a French-British financier, tycoon and politician who was a member of the prominent Goldsmith family.
