Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/65

. 1] burden of unemployment and crime; investments in public undertakings, such as railways, public works, etc.; the growing cost of military establishments, both before and during the Great War; the destruction of wealth by war; the withdrawal of labor to war; the concentration of population in cities; the high price of land; private ownership of land and other natural resources; impoverishment of the soil; the displacement of the near-by farmer as the chief source of food supply; the fact that farmers' wives no longer compete with large establishments in butter making or poultry raising; drought; hoarding by housewives; daily purchases by housewives and their abandonment of home storage in attic, smokeroom, and cold cellar.

I shall not discuss in detail this list of alleged explanations. While some of them are important factors in raising particular prices, none of them except the war has been important in raising the general scale of prices, and the war, of course, only recently. If other causes seem to the reader to deserve special discussion beyond the brief summary which follows, I would refer him to my previous writings and to the writings of others.

That none of the ingenious explanations enumerated go far to account for so general, or universal, a change of prices is fairly clear when we consider that the rise, before the war, applied to producers' prices as well as to consumers', to wholesalers' prices as well as to retailers', to prices of competitive goods as well as to