Inflation has been with us a long time. If you know your history you'll know that the devastating consequences are an old story, retold repeatedly. It is armies that allow rulers to rule and money provides the means to buy and maintain armies. If you have enough guns (or swords, spears, etc) to rule a society you have enough to take control of the money supply. After that, inflation follows like night after day. The Roman Empire offers a fine illustration.
From the time of Augustus to that of Diocletian the number of Roman troops more than doubled. Over these years the denarius was so thoroughly debased by a succession of rulers that, by the time of Diocletian, it had been reduced to a silverless, copper plated coin. By A.D. 268 it had fallen to one five-thousandth of its original value. Trade increasingly collapsed into barter and the middle class was nearly wiped out.
Diocletian recognized the heavy toll of centuries of inflation through the abuse of the fiat currency. In an effort to build up the Empire's coffers, he decreed payment of taxes be in goods. Furthermore, in an ill-conceived effort to address the effects rather than the cause of Rome's chronic economic malaise, all manner of price, wage, production and anti-hoarding regulations were imposed.
Most notorious and draconian among these impositions were those in his infamous A.D. 301 Edict. Therein it decreed that those who violated the controls were to be punished by death. There is some dispute among historians as to how responsible his Edict was for the subsequent bloodshed in the Empire. What isn't in dispute was the continuing inflation-driven economic collapse. Inflation ran on unabated. This was illustrated in the continuing free fall of the denarius' value: set by Diocletian in A.D. 301 at 50,000 per pound of gold, by 337, the year of Constantine's death, that same pound of gold purchased 20,000,000 denarii!
Over the subsequent century, the situation became so untenable that Romans abandoned the market entirely. Some fled. Others entered voluntary serfdom. Indeed, the feudal system, often depicted as a result of the fall of Rome, in reality, arose in the bosom of Rome, in response to a monetary economy crippled by a currency nearing worthlessness.
Certainly, explanatory efforts to pinpoint any single cause for an event as epic as the fall of Rome would be too simplistic. There can be no doubt, however, those centuries of economic deterioration played an important role. Indeed, the common practice of portraying the barbarian invasions as a conquest is a bit misleading. For the majority of the Roman lower class - a category into which much of the middle class had fallen - the sackers of Rome were not conquers, but liberators: liberation from the denarius.
Those seeking insights for the contemporary world can find everything they need to know in this tale. A good generated out of the market for common benefit is corrupted by power and coercion . Coercive rulers (however serving of the people and the common good they claim themselves to be) transform the money from a market-valued currency into a coercively decreed value. This is what fiat means. The money is legally required to be treated as being worth something it simply is not. No less than in the story of the Emperor's new clothes, the people are required to pretend the patently false is unquestionably true, while the rulers skim off the actual value to pay the armies which allow them to run the whole scam from the start.
The first result is rising prices as producers and merchants try to compensate for the lesser value of the money they're forced to accept at make-believe rates. If the rulers with the weapons of coercion follow with price controls, then the quality and quantity are diminished - often surreptitiously.
If wage, price, quota, etc., regulations are coercively imposed in an effort to suppress these natural market adjustments, as happened with Rome, the very collapse of the official monetary economy can follow. Black markets spring up everywhere and those simply trying to improve the quality of life for themselves and their families, through voluntary exchange, are forced to abandon the monetary economy in a variety of different ways.
When money was in the currency of coinage creating fiat currency was labor intensive and expensive. People actually had to work to re-mint the coins with reduced precious metal content. Those arduous days for the inflators are behind us. In our age of computerized money the Federal Reserve, like all of today's central banks, only need declare what is the money supply. It's simply too easy and convenient to abuse the fiat and plunder the people's savings.
Remember, though, money is just a commodity, equally as subject to forces of supply-and-demand as anything else. When the supply increases the per-unit demand falls. The purchasing power of the existing currency units thus fall.
If you imagine that carrying your dollars in your wallet, or even locking them in your home wall safe, secures them from theft, think again. Inflation is the most insidious theft of all. Every time that the central bank inflates the money supply your dollars shrink - wherever you're storing them. Once more of them are circulating, each one is worth less. Consequently, merchants need more of them to pay their business expenses and so on down the line of their suppliers.
Rulers certainly are not prepared to admit their fault in this spiraling monetary catastrophe. Much easier and more convenient to blame rising prices on greedy bakers, bankers, merchants, businessmen, capitalists, corporations, Jews, or whoever is the scapegoat of choice at that time and place. All this merely obscures the fact that such businesses are merely trying to re-establish the market value of the debased money.
And so it goes. Present-day fiat currency driven monetary policy in both the United States and Europe reveal that little has changed since the collapse of Rome. It's not so much, I suspect, though, that the lessons haven't been learned. It's just that, when you control all the guns, it's so easy to control the money, and who isn't susceptible to the vanity that a monetary policy that serves their interest is in the interest of the so-called greater good?
Our human predisposition toward vanity and self-serving delusion hardly seems anywhere near extinction. One wonders if submission to being bossed around and impoverished by maniacal rulers might, though, some day.
From the time of Augustus to that of Diocletian the number of Roman troops more than doubled. Over these years the denarius was so thoroughly debased by a succession of rulers that, by the time of Diocletian, it had been reduced to a silverless, copper plated coin. By A.D. 268 it had fallen to one five-thousandth of its original value. Trade increasingly collapsed into barter and the middle class was nearly wiped out.
Diocletian recognized the heavy toll of centuries of inflation through the abuse of the fiat currency. In an effort to build up the Empire's coffers, he decreed payment of taxes be in goods. Furthermore, in an ill-conceived effort to address the effects rather than the cause of Rome's chronic economic malaise, all manner of price, wage, production and anti-hoarding regulations were imposed.
Most notorious and draconian among these impositions were those in his infamous A.D. 301 Edict. Therein it decreed that those who violated the controls were to be punished by death. There is some dispute among historians as to how responsible his Edict was for the subsequent bloodshed in the Empire. What isn't in dispute was the continuing inflation-driven economic collapse. Inflation ran on unabated. This was illustrated in the continuing free fall of the denarius' value: set by Diocletian in A.D. 301 at 50,000 per pound of gold, by 337, the year of Constantine's death, that same pound of gold purchased 20,000,000 denarii!
Over the subsequent century, the situation became so untenable that Romans abandoned the market entirely. Some fled. Others entered voluntary serfdom. Indeed, the feudal system, often depicted as a result of the fall of Rome, in reality, arose in the bosom of Rome, in response to a monetary economy crippled by a currency nearing worthlessness.
Certainly, explanatory efforts to pinpoint any single cause for an event as epic as the fall of Rome would be too simplistic. There can be no doubt, however, those centuries of economic deterioration played an important role. Indeed, the common practice of portraying the barbarian invasions as a conquest is a bit misleading. For the majority of the Roman lower class - a category into which much of the middle class had fallen - the sackers of Rome were not conquers, but liberators: liberation from the denarius.
Those seeking insights for the contemporary world can find everything they need to know in this tale. A good generated out of the market for common benefit is corrupted by power and coercion . Coercive rulers (however serving of the people and the common good they claim themselves to be) transform the money from a market-valued currency into a coercively decreed value. This is what fiat means. The money is legally required to be treated as being worth something it simply is not. No less than in the story of the Emperor's new clothes, the people are required to pretend the patently false is unquestionably true, while the rulers skim off the actual value to pay the armies which allow them to run the whole scam from the start.
The first result is rising prices as producers and merchants try to compensate for the lesser value of the money they're forced to accept at make-believe rates. If the rulers with the weapons of coercion follow with price controls, then the quality and quantity are diminished - often surreptitiously.
If wage, price, quota, etc., regulations are coercively imposed in an effort to suppress these natural market adjustments, as happened with Rome, the very collapse of the official monetary economy can follow. Black markets spring up everywhere and those simply trying to improve the quality of life for themselves and their families, through voluntary exchange, are forced to abandon the monetary economy in a variety of different ways.
When money was in the currency of coinage creating fiat currency was labor intensive and expensive. People actually had to work to re-mint the coins with reduced precious metal content. Those arduous days for the inflators are behind us. In our age of computerized money the Federal Reserve, like all of today's central banks, only need declare what is the money supply. It's simply too easy and convenient to abuse the fiat and plunder the people's savings.
Remember, though, money is just a commodity, equally as subject to forces of supply-and-demand as anything else. When the supply increases the per-unit demand falls. The purchasing power of the existing currency units thus fall.
If you imagine that carrying your dollars in your wallet, or even locking them in your home wall safe, secures them from theft, think again. Inflation is the most insidious theft of all. Every time that the central bank inflates the money supply your dollars shrink - wherever you're storing them. Once more of them are circulating, each one is worth less. Consequently, merchants need more of them to pay their business expenses and so on down the line of their suppliers.
Rulers certainly are not prepared to admit their fault in this spiraling monetary catastrophe. Much easier and more convenient to blame rising prices on greedy bakers, bankers, merchants, businessmen, capitalists, corporations, Jews, or whoever is the scapegoat of choice at that time and place. All this merely obscures the fact that such businesses are merely trying to re-establish the market value of the debased money.
And so it goes. Present-day fiat currency driven monetary policy in both the United States and Europe reveal that little has changed since the collapse of Rome. It's not so much, I suspect, though, that the lessons haven't been learned. It's just that, when you control all the guns, it's so easy to control the money, and who isn't susceptible to the vanity that a monetary policy that serves their interest is in the interest of the so-called greater good?
Our human predisposition toward vanity and self-serving delusion hardly seems anywhere near extinction. One wonders if submission to being bossed around and impoverished by maniacal rulers might, though, some day.
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