Quotation of the Day…

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… is from pages 48-49 of the great economic historian T.S. Ashton’s 1951 paper “The Treatment of Capitalism by Historians,” which is chapter 1 of the 1954 volume edited by F.A. Hayek, Capitalism and the Historians (footnote deleted):

In the years that followed the long [Napoleonic] war, then, the builders had the task of making up arrears of housing and of meeting the needs of a rapidly growing population. They were handicapped by costs, a large part of which arose from fiscal exactions. The expenses of occupying a house were loaded with heavy local burdens, and so the net rent that most workingmen could afford to pay was reduced. In these circumstances, if the relatively poor were to be housed at all, the buildings were bound to be smaller, less substantial, and less well provided with amenities than could be desired. It was emphatically not the machine, not the Industrial Revolution, not even the speculative bricklayer or carpenter that was at fault. Few builders seem to have made fortunes, and the incidence of bankruptcy was high. The fundamental problem was the shortage of houses. Those who blame the jerry-builder remind one of the parson, referred to by Edwin Cannan, who used to upbraid the assembled worshippers for the poor attendance at church.