Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/114

60 attributing high prices to the personal turpitude of profiteers. The fault is not theirs. While they have, in a sense, won their neighbors' stakes or picked their neighbors' pockets, they did so without intent to defraud. They have simply played the game. We should stop the game, not blame those who play it. How can we blame a business man (especially one who, as officer of a corporation, acts in the interests of others whose capital he is managing) for getting the best prices he can? We cannot expect him to sell below the market. In fact, if market conditions cause profits to fall into his lap, he would be recreant in duty to throw them away. What we should aim to do is to make such abnormal market conditions impossible.

7. Two Illustrative Cases

Consider a working girl who in 1896 put a hundred dollars in the savings bank. To-day if she has allowed it to accumulate at 3% interest, she has two hundred dollars. But things now cost about three times what they did in 1896, and when she sets out to spend her two hundred dollars she finds she cannot get as much for it as she could have got at the beginning for her original one hundred dollars. After a score of years of self-denial, where is her reward, her interest? She has (without the intention of anybody) been cheated out of it all, and more too, merely through the depreciation of the "dollars " in terms of which her savings account has been kept. Her interest accrued not even fast enough to offset the depreciation in her principal. Like Alice Through the Looking-Glass, she had to run as fast as she could in order to stay in the same place!