Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/296

242 been losing the equivalent of more than 100% of his income, yet the ordinary man who believes "a dollar is a dollar" gives scant attention to such a proposition and, if he finds any fault at all with rising prices, vents his wrath not upon inanimate gold or credit but upon the luckless "profiteers," the retailers, the landlords, the trusts, the middlemen, the tariff, or the trade unions.

So also the savings bank depositor, who during the last two decades has been defrauded of all his interest through the depreciation of the dollar, does not yet understand either this fact or its cause.

The reason for such astounding indifference to the colossal interests involved is that the loss is indirect and, until recent years, has not even been measured.

It has always been found that there is less complaint under indirect than under direct taxation. The ordinary tax payer feels, and complains of, direct taxation because he can see and measure it. But the economist cannot rouse the tax payer from his lethargy enough to make him cry out against the outrages of indirect taxation. All the cartoons and figures designed to show, for instance, how the tariff taxes the consumer, make comparatively little impression; and it has required several generations to bring the American consumer to the point of even mildly protesting against a high tariff.

If, then, there is so conspicuous an absence of complaint over huge losses, because hidden, it is not to be expected that there will be complaint over the correction of these losses, especially as these corrections also lie hidden from view, or over the small fluctuations left uncorrected. To be specific: if, as experience proves, the price level has to change more than twenty-five per cent before eliciting protests we need not fear quarrels over one or two per cent.

In short, if the monetary system proposed were once