Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/259

10] Of course the foregoing figures do not pretend to give, with absolute exactness, what would have happened under stabilization, for the reason that the five hypotheses do not state the exact conditions which would obtain. Thus the tendency is of course ever changing. The influence of the adjustment in weight of the dollar would doubtless be distributed somewhat differently from the distribution assumed in the figures. But the stabilization process, by its very nature, adapts itself to whatever situation is presented and relentlessly pursues and ultimately eliminates each deviation as it occurs. The figures give us as good a picture as we can secure, until the actual plan is inaugurated, of what the general behavior of the index number would be.

This behavior would usually be very stable. For to keep the price level within two or three per cent of par as is here done, is, for all practical purposes, to keep it perfectly stable. The only evils of instability which are really felt are the cumulative evils of a long sustained rise or fall. In particular, as we have seen, demonstrations of popular unrest, like populism during falling prices and I. W. W.ism during rising prices, develop only after the fall or rise has proceeded both long and far; and this could not happen with the price level closely tethered to par.

10. A Tentative Draft of an Act to Stabilize the Dollar Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled : (Replacement of Unstable, by Stable Dollar) Sec. 1. That at three o'clock, Eastern time, in the morning of January 1, 1921, the gold dollar of the United States shall cease to be a constant quantity of gold of variable purchasing power, and thereafter shall be a variable quantity of standard gold bul-