Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/90

36 money he can get and naturally reasons that a country, like an individual, cannot have too much. If the reasoning were sound, it would justify counterfeiting. Counterfeiting does enrich the counterfeiter—but at the expense, of course, of others, even if the counterfeit is never detected. Inflation might almost be called legal counterfeiting.

After a rapid inflation once starts, the clamor for more money often grows louder and louder, just as when a dipsomaniac once gets under the influence of liquor he calls for more and more of that deceptive agent.

Of all the illusions which cluster about money, the one which most interests us here is the illusion that money is always fixed in value, that "a dollar is a dollar." If this were really true, the present book would not have been written. That so many people assume it to be true is the reason there is so little demand for a change. For why try to stabilize what is already supposed to be stable?

Money is so much an accepted convenience in practice that it has become a great stumbling block in theory. Since we talk always in terms of money and live in a money atmosphere, as it were, we become as unconscious of it as we do of the air we breathe.

To shake ourselves free of these illusions it would help greatly if, for the phrase "a general rise in prices," we should substitute the phrase, "a fall in the purchasing power of the dollar." Our attention would then be focused on the money, which is the chief controller and disturber of prices.

Even many well informed people bolster up the illusion that the dollar is a stable standard of value