The truth is that the public interest is not, as is widely believed, the sum of private interests, but its opposite. Consequently, the real political problem consists in finding a system whereby the general interest can prevail over the aggregate of individual wills. There was such a system before the war, and bankruptcy was its decisive instrument. Any community which tried to resist needed adjustments of prices or wages was doomed to self-destruction because it would exhaust its resources; and the same fate could be expected by a central bank which would not adapt its monetary policy to the fluctuations of its balances. The ever-present threat of bankruptcy subjected all persons, even the most unwilling, to the harsh law of prices, and made short shrift of those who, through inability or dissipation, had not managed to subordinate their own interests or those of their associates to the higher interests of the community to which they belonged.
Bankruptcy is not merely a moral device or a way to achieve equity; it is primarily and especially the condition for the efficiency of the price mechanism, of the economic system which is usually called capitalism. The system would collapse without it, deprived of the sole compulsion which obliges the individual to bring his otherwise unimpeded activities into conformity with the conditions necessary for the survival of the system.
--Jacques Rueff,
The Age of Inflation, trans. A. H. Meeus and F. G. Clarke (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1964), 43-44.
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