Daily Inspiration Quote by William Vickrey

“Necessary and proper” is lawyerly language smuggled into economics, and that’s the point. Vickrey isn’t merely arguing that deficits can be useful; he’s asserting legitimacy. In the late-20th-century climate of deficit panic and moralizing about balanced budgets, he reframes fiscal red ink as a tool of constitutional seriousness rather than political indulgence. The phrasing quietly flips the burden of proof: the scandal isn’t borrowing, it’s tolerating joblessness.

The subtext is a values fight disguised as technocracy. Unemployment is labeled “the far greater evil,” a moral ranking that punctures the common habit of treating deficits as the obvious adult concern. Vickrey is making a welfare calculus: idle people mean wasted skills, frayed communities, deferred family formation, poorer health, and the corrosive humiliation of being “unneeded.” A deficit, by contrast, is an accounting artifact that can be managed, rolled over, or inflated away; unemployment is lived experience that compounds.

Context matters. Vickrey, a Nobel-winning economist associated with public finance and pragmatic policy, writes in the shadow of post-1970s stagflation and the rise of anti-Keynesian politics, when “government spending” became a cultural villain. His intent is to rehabilitate countercyclical fiscal policy not as a partisan preference but as a humane obligation. The line also anticipates modern debates about austerity: he’s warning that treating deficits as the supreme evil invites governments to choose the optics of prudence over the substance of welfare.