Is the national debt a burden on the nation? It is not, provided it is being held domestically, proclaimed President Franklin D. Roosevelt. "One pocket owes it to the other." . . . Since the public debt is no debt in the common meaning of the term, it need not be and virtually never has been repaid, according to the managed-money and creeping-inflation advocates. We should learn to live with the mammoth debt and accept the alleged necessity of its further growth. Let us go on accumulating budget deficits whenever "needed." . . .
But the principle of "one pocket owes it to the other" applies to a communistic society only. When everything belongs to the state, all liabilities are a matter of mere bookkeeping. Conversely, he who denies that the debt is more than a bookkeeping item, wittingly or unwittingly, negates the system of private property. Under that system, the "pockets" of creditors are distinctly separate from those of debtors.
--Melchior Palyi,
An Inflation Primer (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1962), 98-99.
