Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/210

156 the future. In the start-off, i.e. in the selection of the par or price level which the new system would undertake to maintain, only the middle of these three groups need be considered.

It is true that the chief purpose of the new plan is to provide for the third class, future contracts; for these include the numberless contracts of generations yet unborn. But for this purpose any price level whatever would serve for the par as well as any other, even if it were ten times as high or as low as the present price level.

Nor do the contracts of the past concern us. They have been written off the books and are beyond recall or correction. Nor can those who suffered losses or made gains on past contracts be selected out and indemnified or assessed damages to-day. And, if these past victims could be found, the adjustments they would require could not be accomplished by selecting any particular price level such as that existing at some particular date in the past. A reversion to standards from which we have drifted far will only make bad matters worse. Two wrongs do not make a right. Bygones must be bygones.

To urge going back to an antiquated price level was a fatal mistake in the 16 to 1 proposal in the '90s which aimed to go back to the "dollar of the daddies" and the price level of 1873.

To-day those who talk of pre-war prices as "normal" might almost as well talk of the price of 1896 as "normal." They do not stop to think that most of the adjustments have been made nor of the injustice which a reversion to an obsolete standard would do to the contracts of the present.

The war debts both in this country and in Europe, for instance, have been, for the most part, contracted at high price levels. If we should drop back to the 1913 level of prices it would almost double the burden of our national debt, for the government would have to repay dollars almost twice as big in purchasing