Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/107

 CHAPTER III

THE EVILS

1. The Evil of High Prices is Not General Impoverishment

Price movements, then, are usually, and for the most part, of monetary origin. We must not be deceived by appearances. Just as he who would picture the astronomical movements as they really are must conceive a mental image not of a sun and stars concertedly rising and setting around a fixed earth, but of a sun and stars, substantially fixed, shining on a whirling globe, so he who would picture economic movements as they really are must likewise conceive not of the concerted dancing of numberless commodities relatively to a fixed dollar, but of the dance of the dollar relatively to a nearly fixed mass of commodities.

But here the reader may be tempted to conclude that the high cost of living is merely nominal! If prices have doubled not because goods have become scarce but only because the dollars in which they are expressed have been cut in two, what of it? If we use twice as many dollars because we have twice as many to use, where is the harm? We are thus brought to the third question, "What of it?"

Now it is quite true that our high cost of living is not so great an evil as some people think it to be; it is not so bad as though the cost of living had risen while 53