Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/157

11] Instead of thus employing an army of policemen, exerting repressive force at thousands and millions of separate points, we simply regulated our instrument of measuring time, the clock, and lo, automatically the factory, store, school, and church began an hour earlier and individuals ate their breakfast an hour earlier of their own free will.

So with the price level, while the strong-arm method is not only costly and vexatious but futile, the simple regulation of our instrument for measuring prices, the dollar, will accomplish the same result not only without cost and effort but, what is more to the point, with success.

It is very hard to control any individual price in the face of the economic forces of supply and demand, but it is very easy to control the general scale of prices; for the general scale of prices depends, among other things, on the weight of the gold dollar and the weight of the gold dollar is whatever we choose to make it.

However great may be the disturbing effect of some other cause on the scale of prices, that effect can always be neutralized by a suitable change in the weight of the gold dollar, provided, of course, that all other dollars are kept redeemable in gold dollars.

The gold dollar, being the basic unit, is the key to the situation.