21st Century Mercantilism
"[The Mercantilists] were emphatic that an unduly high rate of interest was the main obstacle to the growth of wealth...and several of them made it clear that their preoccupation with increasing the quantity of money was due to their desire to diminish the rate of interest."
"As the economic aspect of state absolutism, mercantilism was of necessity a system of state-building, of big government, of heavy royal expenditure, of high taxes, of (especially after the late 17th century) inflation and deficit finance, of war, imperialism, and the aggrandizing of the nation-state. In short, a politicoeconomic system very like that of the present day."
"Mercantilism has had a 'good press' in recent decades, in contrast to 19th-century opinion. In the days of Adam Smith and the classical economists, mercantilism was properly regarded as a blend of economic fallacy and state creation of special privilege. But in our century, the general view of mercantilism has changed drastically."Keynesians hail mercantilists as prefiguring their own economic insights; Marxists, constitutionally unable to distinguish between free enterprise and special privilege, hail mercantilism as a 'progressive' step in the historical development of capitalism; socialists and interventionists salute mercantilism as anticipating modern state building and central planning."Mercantilism, which reached its height in the Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries, was a system of statism which employed economic fallacy to build up a structure of imperial state power, as well as special subsidy and monopolistic privilege to individuals or groups favored by the state."