On Inflation
“Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.”
- Milton Friedman
“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
Ernest Hemingway
“The most important thing to remember is that inflation is not an act of God, that inflation is not a catastrophe of the elements or a disease that comes like the plague. Inflation is a policy.”
- Ludwig von Mises
In Creature From Jekyll Island, Edward Griffin explains inflation as follows:
“…we have the phenomenon called inflation which is the appearance of rising prices. I emphasize the word ‘appearance’ because in reality prices are not rising at all. What we’re seeing is that the value of the dollar is going down, that’s the real side of the equation. If we had real money based on gold or silver or anything tangible that couldn’t just be created out of thin air, it could be based on microphones, that they couldn’t just create with the stroke of a pen, you would see then that prices would remain stable over a long period of time.
To illustrate that point, it’s interesting to know that if we had lived in ancient Rome with a one ounce gold coin we would’ve been able to buy a very fine toga, a hand-crafted belt and a pair of sandals - that was the price in Rome. Today, if we have a one ounce gold coin what can we buy with it? We can go into any men’s store and buy a very fine suit, a hand-crafted belt and a pair of shoes.”
“The [Federal Reserve Act] as it stands seems to me to open the way to a vast inflation of the currency… I do not like to think that any law can be passed that will make it possible to submerge the gold standard in a flood of irredeemable paper currency.”
- Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., 1913
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