THIS series of massive economic bailouts – £100bn here, another £100bn there, with heaven knows how many back up “fire walls” running into the trillions – will have the effect of impoverishing a whole generation.

This is the middle aged and elderly generation who have prudently saved and paid into pension funds and who now see their money dwindling alarmingly by the minute.

Only last week, in his Mansion House speech, the Chancellor pledged “£140bn to kick-start the economy.” With a shudder, I opened the newspaper at the business section.

No respite there: “Eurozone banks need a major injection of capital.” In common parlance what these euphemistic headlines mean is: “We’re desperately short of money – so let’s print some more.”

Printing money – so called “quantitative easing” – is a disastrous policy. It’s what led to hyperinflation in Germany in the 1930s.

Money became so worthless that people were reduced to taking home their wages in wheelbarrows and prices of everyday essential foods would double in a single morning. This was the economic chaos which led to the catastrophic destruction and human slaughter of the Second World War. It seems to be true, as Lord Acton said that, “the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history”.

The fact is that we western nations have been living vastly beyond our means since 1945. Governments of all hues, of the left, the right and the centre, have pursued this profligate policy of tax, spend and borrow massively to pay for this relentless splurge on the public sector. It also paid for millions of new box-ticking bureaucrats, bloated and inefficient health and education systems and a huge culture of welfarism. These are the policies which have bankrupted the West. The four-year crisis which broke in 2008 is the day of reckoning for this extreme folly – and it hasn’t finished yet.

We are simply living on funny money. Our currency might just as well be Monopoly money or the pretend pound notes that belong in children’s games. Printing money, and the hyperinflation to which it leads, is the refusal to face reality: like the drunk who goes on drinking in the foolish self-delusion that he will eventually drink himself sober.

There is much handwringing in the media about “austerity” and the dreadful “cuts” imposed by the Government. In fact, there have been, and are planned, no substantial cuts.

And the Government’s own figures tell us that we shall actually be borrowing more at the end of this parliament than we did when it began. Our economic policies amount to pouring yet more petrol on the fire that will eventually burn down all our houses.

We have to relearn the art of living within our means and encourage production, manufacture and trade in real things. We must encourage practical business and entrepreneurship, for these are the only means by which genuine prosperity is created. Cut taxes massively. Cast off the shackles of regulation and controls on business enterprise.

Only then will the recovery begin.

The tragedy is that no government will do this, because it fears the wrath of an electorate which has simply got used to being artificially pampered and fattened way beyond its means since the end of the Second World War. It is no use just waiting for “something to turn up”. It’s time we got real.