Wealth & Money Quote by Carroll Quigley

Quigley’s line is a moral claim disguised as a technical one: printing money is not inherently wicked, but its legitimacy hinges on what it’s used for. By pairing “depression” and “war,” he forces an ethical contrast between social rescue and organized destruction, then stakes out a hierarchy of ends. “More justifiable” is doing the heavy lifting. He doesn’t say fiat finance is good; he says it can be defensible when the alternative is mass unemployment, cascading bankruptcies, and political breakdown. The subtext is Keynesian without the name-checking: in a slump, idle labor and unused factories mean new money can mobilize real capacity rather than just bid up prices.

War flips that logic. Financing conflict through fiat can look like a shortcut around democratic friction: no tax hike to debate, no bond campaign requiring consent, just a central-bank lever. Quigley is hinting at a problem of accountability. Inflation becomes a hidden levy, spread across everyone but felt most by those least able to hedge. It’s also a way to launder policy choices through “necessity,” turning monetary expansion into patriotic inevitability.

Context matters: Quigley wrote in the long shadow of the Great Depression, two world wars, and the postwar rise of managed currencies. “Fiat money” isn’t a conspiracy code here so much as a reminder that modern states can conjure purchasing power, and that power should be judged by outcomes and by who bears the costs. The sentence works because it reframes monetary policy as civic ethics: the question isn’t can a state print, but should it, and for whom.