Eric Hobsbawm recently observed that “a good deal of economics has the function not so much of telling government or business what they ought to do, as of telling them what they are doing (or not doing) is right.” Economic history, happily or unhappily, does not suffer from the same weakness. Its problem is rather the reverse: a good deal of economic history has the didactic function of telling us what should have been done, as though that were always possible. So it is with the critics of the Lloyd George coalition's postwar economic policies; they work from a retrospectively-divined ideal back to an explanation for the coalition's melancholic failure to grasp and pursue that ideal. This has made for portrayals of the untried paths as relatively unobstructed, clearly marked and negotiable, while the route actually taken is seen as a gamut, bordered by briars and surfaced with quagmires, through which the nation emerged badly scathed and shaken. To veer off the course of this prickly metaphor, the critics of the coalition's refusal to deflate or its negligence – one might almost say abandon – toward inflation and permissiveness make two types of arguments.
Most conspicuous by their unmitigated scorn are the socialists who see in the wartime state the first buds of what a socialist Britain could flower into.