most textbooks talk about industrial capitalism as if the function of banks is to make loans to factories to build plants and equipment and hire more labor to produce goods and keep the economy going, and that’s what everybody expected banks to do in the late 19th century. They expected banks to stop just lending to governments and being predatory and somehow become part of the industrial economy and that was happening in Germany until World War One, but after World War Two you had the rentiers fight back.
You had banks merge with real estate. The fight of classical economics and of industrial capitalism was to get rid of the landlord class, to get rid of everything that increased the cost of living to workers, so that they could pay workers less, not to lower workers living standards, because they know that if you’re going to hire labor, and you want high productivity labor, it has to be well-fed, well-educated, well-dressed, and have good housing. But the industrial class certainly in America and in Germany wanted government to pick up as many of these costs as possible.
They wanted government to pay for education and that’s what you had in the United States and England they wanted government to pay for health care, and it was a conservative
— source michael-hudson.com | Michael Hudson | Aug 8, 2022