Germany tried paying people for not working after WWI. It didn’t turn out so well.
Massive government debt, sky-high unemployment, the economy frozen, idle workers receiving payments from the government. This might sound like COVID-19, but I am actually talking about post-World War I Germany.
If your high school history teacher skipped this story, here’s a bullet-point recap: Germany lost World War I in 1919. Great Britain and France punished Germany with huge fines. Germans resented the fines and defaulted on their payments. France got fed up and in 1923 invaded Germany’s coal-rich Ruhr valley to extract payments themselves. Germans offered […]
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