Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/130

76 dollar to-day being worth scarcely a third of what the gold dollar of 1896 was worth. Yet who thinks of that depreciation as atoning for the "Crime of '73"! On the contrary, we regard that depreciation (as shown in the rising price level) as but another evil. We now wish to find a remedy for it as well; and so to-day we are being threatened with other unscientific remedies, such as revolutionary socialism, syndicalism, and Bolshevism. Reckless radicalism rides in on the wave of high prices.

16. The Loss Is General

We have seen that the primary evil of these aberrations is social injustice, a sort of subtle pocket picking. At first glance it might seem that such a transfer is not a general evil; for what some lose others seem to gain, and they do—at first. But the secondary evils are very general, namely, the evils from speculation, uncertainty, crises, depression, resentment, violence, ill-considered "remedies." Moreover, curiously enough, as with ordinary gambling, even the ill-gotten gains of the winners are largely swept away in the end. Thus, as during the present rise of prices, strikes, riots, violence, and the other secondary effects of rising prices destroy the profits of the winners by blocking the wheels of industry and even destroying its tools. If we are going to have discontented workmen smash our windows and run the wooden shoe through our machinery, it is not so much a question of who is going to get the profits as a question of whether there are to be any profits. If we want workmen to be contented, we must let them have a fair share of prosperity and not let a shrinking dollar defraud them.