Primarily a gainer when prices are falling, because his wages fall more slowly than prices, he nevertheless suffers more unemployment during this lowered cost of living than during rising prices, and in the mismanagement, at the end, he suffers with the rest.
In short, almost no one gains long or gains much either from rising prices or from falling prices. To society as a whole, there is, in either case, a great net economic loss as well as great injury to social justice and good will.
17. Conclusion
Thus this seemingly simple little matter of shortening or lengthening the monetary yardstick, so far from being a merely nominal and unimportant change, is really more or less responsible for some of the greatest events in history.[1] It causes mighty convulsions of prices and these, directly or indirectly, rock the social structure to its foundation.
- ↑ Besides the effects of price movements above cited, which are specifically evil, history is full of other great effects,—some even beneficent. Price movements, like wars, inevitably arouse, irritate, stimulate. Falling prices stimulated the great Irish land agitation and the Home-rule movement because of the pitiable condition of the Irish peasant debtors. Falling prices stimulated the idea of Protective tariffs. Rising prices stimulated the idea of Free Trade. England abolished the corn laws when the cost of living was rising, and under the same whip the United States adopted the Underwood low tariff and, earlier, the low tariff of 1857. It was as an antidote for the falling prices of the '20s and the '90s that the doctrine of protection scored its greatest successes in the United States. Not only economic history but political and social history would have been totally different had it not been for the aberrations of monetary units.
