Where's the Money Coming From? again

Sixty-five years ago Stuart Chase wrote a book entitled, Where's the Money Coming From, in which he offered five examples of instances in which a country, when faced with an urgent need for money, said that it did not have and could not acquire any, but which actually found the money, plenty of it, when it needed it for war. The partial exception to this is that Russia needed it not for war but for its five-year plan, while the others needed it for war. In any case, the point made by Stuart Chase was that finance actually is available and can be provided when a country needs it.

A perfect example of this was the United States finding the money to fight World War II beginning in 1941, when Japan invaded Pearl Harbor, although this occurred at about the worst possible time: during the Great Depression, when the country actually was poor and very short of money. Well, the money was found, billions and billions of it, to defeat Japan and Germany.

And yet only yesterday Al Gore expressed the fear that the money was not available to deal with global warming, which he feels is the most urgent problem in the world. This assessment is not at all surprising; almost everyone would agree with Mr. Gore that we can't afford to do much about global warming.

Why is this so? Not only do we have the examples in which the money is found when needed, but also we have the explanation provided by John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory of Unemployment, Interest and Money in 1936. This is indeed a puzzlement.