Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/287

, C] idea and was ridiculed when first suggested seriously. To-day, as recorded in Appendix V, § 2, it is in use among a number of progressive industrial concerns and some official agencies.

The present stabilization plan has itself received the approval of several hundred prominent economists, educators, bankers, business men, lawyers, publicists, and officials, as is shown in Appendix IV, § 3.

B. "The tide may turn." This suggestion is to let well enough alone because perhaps the wrongs of the present may be righted in the future by a reverse movement of the price level.

But, even if there should be such a reversal in store for us, two wrongs will not make a right. If prices are to fall, there is the same need of a stabilizer as though they were to rise. When prices were falling the same sort of cheer was offered us: " Wait, prices may rise!"

If this reasoning were correct we ought now to be thankful for the rising cost of living as a providential compensation for the falling prices of 1873-1896!

In order to prove the needlessness of standardization it must be shown that, in the future, we have reason to expect neither a rise nor a fall of prices but a stable price level—a condition of things which, so far as index numbers show us, has never yet existed, and which we feel safe in saying can never exist under our present monetary system.

C. "It requires governmental interference." In these days of Governmental participation in economic problems this objection will not frighten many people, especially as the increase in Governmental functions over those already existing in the regulation of the value of money is infinitesimal. The Government already buys and sells gold, handles gold reserves of several kinds, and publishes an index number. The plan does little more, except to use the index number to set the price at which the Government buys and sells gold, in order to make the dollar a real standard of value instead of leaving its value