Irving Fisher

“ Imagine for one moment any American mother giving to her baby toys made by Germany while she thinks of tens of thousands of babies murdered by Germany in this war. Every toy made in Germany and every other piece of goods of every kind will for generations bear a bloody stain which all the waters of all the oceans can never wash out. ”

“ Thus a lowered gold price, or raised dollar weight, can reduce any stock of gold, however large, into a small number of dollars simply by enlarging each dollar; while, contrariwise, a raised gold price, or lowered dollar weight, can multiply any stock of gold, however small, into an ample supply simply by breaking it up into a larger number. It is like multiplying the loaves and fishes,—except that there is nothing miraculous about it, since small dollars will feed our monetary needs as well as larger dollars, provided they buy as much. ”

“ Besides the monetary inflow and outflow through import and export, there is an inflow and outflow through minting and melting. In other words, not only do the stocks of money in the world connect with each other like interconnecting bodies of water, but they connect in the same way with the outside stock of bullion. In the modern world one of the precious metals, such as gold, usually plays the part of primary money, and this metal has two uses,—a monetary use and a commodity use. That is to say, gold is not only a money material, but a commodity as well. ”

“ Our dollar is now simply a fixed weight of gold—a unit of weight, masquerading as a unit of value. It is almost as absurd to define a unit of value, or general purchasing power, in terms of weight as to define a unit of length in terms of weight. What good does it do us to be assured that our dollar weighs just as much as ever? We want a dollar which will always buy the same aggregate quantity of bread, butter, beef, bacon, beans, sugar, clothing, fuel, and the other essential things that we spend it for. ”

“ It is amazing how tenaciously many people cling to the mistaken idea that an individual price, though expressed in money, may be determined wholly without reference to money. Others, more open-minded but almost equally confused, see the necessity of including the quantity of money among the causes determining prices, but in the careless spirit of eclecticism simply jumble it in with a miscellaneous collection of influences affecting prices, with no regard for their mutual relations. It should be clearly recognized that price levels must be studied independently of individual prices. ”

“ I.18 What we have been speaking of as property is the right to the services, uses, or benefits of wealth. By benefits of wealth is meant the desirable events which occur by means of wealth. Like wealth and property, benefits also may be measured, but in units of a still different character. Benefits are reckoned either "by time,"—as the services of a gardener or of a dwelling house; or "by the piece,"—as the use of a plow or a telephone. And just as the concepts of transfer, exchange, price, and value apply to wealth and property, so do they apply to benefits. ”

“ It scarcely occurs to any of them that he needs a knowledge as to gold; yet every bargain into which he enters depends for one of its two terms on gold. I cannot but believe that the diffusion among business men of the fuller knowledge of the equation of exchange, of the relation of money to deposits, of credit cycles and of interest, which the future is sure to bring, will pay rich returns in mitigating the evils of crises and depressions which now take them so often unawares. ”

“ The evil is not one of average well-being but one of its distribution, and the question remains: Who has got the benefit of this increased production? Some incomes change less than others and some do not change at all. It is in this inequality—an inequality in the change of individual incomes—that the chief evil of general price movements is to be found.
If, for each of us, the rise of income were to keep up with the rise in the cost of living, then the high cost of living would have no real meaning. The rise would be merely on paper. ”

“ Many years ago, Disraeli, keenly alive to influences affecting national prosperity, stated: “Public Health is the foundation on which reposes the happiness of the people and the power of a country. The care of the public health is the first duty of a statesman.” It may well be claimed that the care of individual and family health is the first and most patriotic duty of a citizen. ”

“ If we do not do this; if we do not provide a really scientific remedy; if we take the ground that we must drift with the tides of gold and credit, that we are helpless to rectify or prevent in the future the great social injustices which history warns us will surely come, as between creditor and debtor, wage earner and employer, salaried man and profit-taker, we shall be simply fertilizing the soil of public opinion for a crop of dangerous radicalism. Then surely some demagogue will flourish, and offer some ill-considered remedy which will sweep everything before it. ”

“ Now there are three ways of dealing with a blackleg: he may be elbowed out of the industrial world altogether; he may be penned up, as women have been penned up, in the lowest and most undesirable grades; or he may be turned into a trade unionist. As far as women are concerned, the first two are closed by national expediency, humanity and justice. The third lies open; and in view of the peculiar economic rocks which loom vaguely ahead of us, it may be said without exaggeration that one woman trade-union leader is worth a hundred welfare workers. ”

“ The purpose of the Life Extension Institute embraces the extension of human life, not only as to length, but also, if we may so express it, as to breadth and depth. It endeavors to accomplish this purpose in many ways, but especially through individual hygiene.
Thoroughly carried out, individual hygiene implies high ideals of health, strength, endurance, symmetry, and beauty; it enormously increases our capacity to work, to be happy, and to be useful; it develops, not only the body, but the mind and the heart; it ennobles the man as a whole. ”

“ They seek the causes wholly in the goods, the prices of which have changed, and not at all in the gold dollar, in terms of which those prices are expressed.
Which of these—goods in general, or the dollar in particular—is the more likely to vary? Is it credible that commodities should rise and fall so concertedly without some simple common cause? Is it not more probable that the dollar, which, as such a common cause, affects all the commodities it buys, should fall in value than that hundreds of individual changes in the values of other commodities should all happen to occur in concert? ”

“ If, in fact, the cause of our participation in the war was merely to repel attacks upon our legal rights as a nation, then indeed, that end being attained, and the aggressor reduced to impotence for the future, we may return within our own borders, withdraw unto ourselves, disclaim all responsibility for the condition of the world elsewhere and plunge into the selfish exploitation of our national resources, "the world forgetting, by the world forgot." ”

“ If this is the case, how fruitless, except as treatments of symptoms, are price-fixing, or campaigns aimed at profiteers! The cry of profiteering may hinder a real solution of the difficulty by diverting attention from the real issue and fanning and giving up an object to the spirit of revolt. 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. ”

“ The truth is, most explanations of the general rise in prices are mere graspings at the first straw in sight that seems to offer any explanation. People unconsciously pick out some particular cases with which they happen to be familiar and drag them before the public. A middleman or a trust raises prices, a firm announces a rise because of the demands of labor unions, a crop failure raises the price of a cereal,—and immediately some one hails the event as a representative cause of the high cost of living. ”

“ The government has of necessity compelled the whole of British industry to produce for war and to produce what it is told to produce, because in no other way could our own armies and our Allies have been supplied. No man is free to do what he likes with his labor and capital, with his ships, or with his steel. He has to do what he is told to do. By this means production for war purposes has enormously increased, and civil consumption has enormously decreased, because the goods for the civil population were no longer produced and one cannot buy what isn't there. ”

“ Though many big criminals were thus exposed, their machinations were scarcely enough to explain a fraction of one per cent of the evil which our shifting dollar has done, and probably are not more than could have been uncovered at almost any time in our history if the same detective work were undertaken.
This muckraking, itself bred of discontent and suspicion, has intensified that suspicion and discontent; for it has exhibited in the limelight of the public press the enormous profits made by big business and high finance, in contrast with the pitiful pay of common labor. ”

“ And as the hideous carnage went on, and we saw a whole generation of the youth of the free nations of Europe butchered because the German people had become so obsessed with their own sense of superiority that they were determined to rule the world and impose upon all other peoples subservience to their Moloch-like gospel of efficiency, another feeling began to struggle for expression in Europe and America alike—a determination that all wars of aggression must cease; that disputes between nations must be settled like those between individuals, by peaceful arbitration or conciliation ”

“ This illusion, that our own money is immovable while everything else moves, is like the illusion we often experience when the railway train in which we are sitting passes another train standing on a switch, or like the illusion that the sun rises and sets instead of the earth revolving. ”

“ It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealings by the other peoples of the world, as against force and selfish aggression. All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us. ”

“ I venture to predict that the Great War will have left at least one other indelible impression, marking a new era in popular intelligence on this subject. This new idea, which I believe will sink into the minds of millions of people, is that, just as gold is a stabler standard than paper, so are goods a stabler standard than gold.
The chief reason that the writers of the famous bullion report did not take this step forward is that, in their day and generation, no index number by which to contrast the two existed. They could not go back of gold to commodities. ”

“ The price of butter at the corner grocery is lifted on this tide without our being able to observe the connection of the rise with inflation, just as a fisherman's boat is lifted by the tides of the sea without his being able to connect the rise with the action of the moon.
To answer categorically, therefore, the question, How does inflation raise the price of butter at the corner grocer's, we may say: (1) partly because his customers have more money to spend, and (2) chiefly because the prices he pays to the wholesaler have been raised ”

“ Said Senator Knox:
"The welfare and safety of the nation imperatively demands that we know we have peace. The whole world seethes with revolution. Our own nation is in ferment and turmoil. Force and strife are rampant and threaten the destruction not only of our property, but of our free institutions and even of our very lives. ”

“ The will to war was a dormant thing throughout the nation. The country was swollen with material success almost to the point expressed in Lincoln's phrase: "A fat hound won't hunt." The evolution of the Government of the United States, enjoying profound peace for more than half a century, except for the minor military operations of the Spanish-American conflict, into a great war-making machine in mercilessly short time was a task to challenge the ability of even the most resourceful nation of the earth. ”

“ Imagine a society with a stable dollar but yet with the very same injustice we now experience except that it is deliberately administered.
To make this supposition definite suppose the United States had had a stable dollar during the last few decades but had, with some strange malice, used the index number of prices in Canada or Europe (which, it is assumed, held to the old unstable system) to produce extraneously the identical evils we have actually experienced. ”