Politics & Power Quote by William Lyon Mackenzie King

King’s line lands like a warning label slapped onto the machinery of democracy: you can keep the rituals of self-government, but if you outsource the purse strings, the script is already written. The phrasing is surgical. “Once” makes the loss irreversible, a point of no return; “parts with” suggests a voluntary surrender dressed up as pragmatism. Then comes the kicker: “it matters not who makes the laws.” Not “it matters less” - not “it becomes harder” - but a flat negation of parliamentary romance. Legislation, he implies, is downstream.

The specific intent is defensive nationalism aimed at the quiet, technocratic realm where sovereignty actually gets negotiated: credit creation, debt terms, and the institutions that decide who gets liquidity and at what price. For a politician operating in an era when Canada’s financial autonomy was still tangled with imperial capital and private banking power, “control of its credit” is code for political independence. He’s not talking about thrift; he’s talking about command over the future, because credit is a claim on tomorrow.

The subtext is class politics without the class vocabulary. Credit isn’t neutral; it picks winners, disciplines governments, and can veto policy without casting a ballot. King’s rhetorical move is to reframe monetary policy from boring infrastructure into the central lever of democratic agency. Laws can promise wages, welfare, war, or development; credit decides which promises get funded and which get filed away as “unrealistic.” In that sense, he’s anticipating a modern reality: markets and lenders don’t need to repeal your laws when they can price them out of existence.