Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/165

. 6] laborer's real wages (i.e. the goods he can buy with his money wages) are increasing; that they are decreasing; that the hardships of wage earners are due to their own wasteful expenditures; that they are due to the greed of employing capitalists who seize an increasing share of the product; that they are due to neither of these things but to the absorption of an ever increasing share of the annual production by the do-nothing landlord or the private owner of natural resources, who expends neither labor nor capital on the development of these resources but merely leases them to men who do, and exacts tribute from the laborer and capitalist for the privilege; that the demands of certain classes of railway laborers for increased money wages are exorbitant and ought not to be granted; that the demands are necessary to balance the increased cost of living and ought to be granted; that the demands of the railways for increased freight rates or of the trolley cars for increased fares are necessary to make good increased costs due to increasing prices and wages; that these demands are not necessary for that purpose—and so on and on without end.

Before action upon these alleged evils can be based on sure ground, it is essential to find out the facts; but the fluctuating dollar hopelessly conceals the facts. It blinds the eyes of the mass of men whose right it is to know the facts and whose duty it ultimately is, under our democratic form of government, to choose one or more remedies for such evils as exist. The fluctuating dollar keeps us all in ignorance; whereas a stabilized dollar would lay bare the facts.

It is no exaggeration to say that stabilizing the dollar would directly and indirectly accomplish more social