What Augustus did was to stabilize Rome's money by defining it in terms of two commodities, each intrinsically valuable, each stable in supply, each almost indestructible, and he defined also the legal ratio between the two coinages - an effort to circumvent Gresham's Law, unknown then but Augustus appears to have had a gut feeling for it. (Not Bill Gresham - the other one. Thomas Gresham.) But a bimetallic standard has its problems; the free economy ratio tends to drift away from the legal ratio, and Gresham's Law begins to work. But this happens very slowly with
hard money and is not the disaster that printing - press inflation is, or the debasing of hard money.
Caesar Augustus died in 14 A.D.
His corpse was hardly cold before the vultures got to work. Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero - even Claudius did nothing to stop the robbery. Titus attempted an Augustan return to honest money in 80 A.D. but he died in September the following year; his successor was a disaster even as Caesars go.
"Put not your trust in Princes." Debasement of the currency continued under every Caesar for the next two centuries. Diocletian (reign: 294 - 305) inherited a worthless denarius; he returned Rome to the bimetallic standard at a level barely below that of Augustus. But he increased enormously the bureaucracy, instituted the harshest of taxation to pay for his "reforms," and decreed price - fixing - which worked just as it always does.
On his retirement (not assassination !) debasement was resumed while taxes stayed high, and Rome was on the skids. The decline and fall of the denarius and of Rome paralleled each other.
I'm tempted to discuss France's incredible inflation and collapse thereof during the French Revolution (and three more French inflations since then), and the inflations of several other countries in other centuries. But they are monotonously alike and differ from debasement primarily in the fact that the invention of paper "money" permits the corruption of legal tender to get utterly out of hand before the people notice it. In Germany in the early twenties people used to take wheelbarrows to the grocery store - not to fetch back groceries but to carry money to the grocer. But the early stages of disastrous inflation feel like "prosperity." Wages and profits go up, old debts are easier to pay off, business booms.
It is not until later that most people notice that prices and taxes have gone up faster than wages and profits, and that it is getting harder and harder to make ends meet.
There is a strong emotional feeling that "a dollar is a dollar." (Hitler called it, "Mark is Mark!") But you can reexamine it in terms of prices on bread, or how many minutes to earn a dollar. And don't forget taxes! If you aren't working at least the first three months of each year to pay taxes before you can keep one dollar for yourself, then you are on welfare, one way or another. You may not think you are taxed that much - paycheck deductions and hidden taxes are extracted under anesthesia. Try dividing the Federal Budget by the number of wage earners not on the public payroll, then take a stab at where you fit in. Don't forget the same process for state, county, and city. There are Makers, Takers, and Fakers, no fourth category, and today the Takers and the Fakers outnumber (and outvote) the Makers.
Today it takes more dollars each year to service the National Debt than the total budget for the last and most expensive year of the Korean War. I am not going to state here the amount of our National Debt. If you have not heard it recently, you wouldn't believe me. If you don't know, telephone your Congressman and ask; he has a local office near you. If the telephone information service can't (won't) tell you, the city room of any newspaper does know his number.
Our National Debt will never be paid. We are beyond the point of no return. Inflation will continue and get worse ... and the elderly on fixed incomes and the young adults trying to start families will continue to bear the brunt.
Every congressman, every senator, knows precisely what causes inflation... but can't (won't) support the drastic reforms to stop it because it could (and probably would) cost him his job. I have no solution and only once piece of advice:
Buy a wheelbarrow.
The Age of Unreason
Having been reared in the most bigoted of Bible Belt fundamentalism in which every word of the King James version of the Bible is the literal word of God - then having broken loose at thirteen when I first laid hands on THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES and THE DESCENT OF MAN - I should have been unsurprised by the anti - intellectual and anti - science ground swell in this country.
I knew that our American temperament, practical as sharp tools on one side, was never more than three quarters of an inch from mindless hysteria on the other side. I knew this - my first long story was IF THIS GOES ON - , a yarn based on the assumption that my compatriots were capable of throwing away their dearly - bought liberties to submit to a crude and ridiculous religious dictatorship.
(In forty years of letters about that story no one has ever criticized this assumption; I infer that I am not alone in believing it.)
I had read much about the Ku Klux Klan during the Tragic Era, talked with many who had experienced it, then experienced its nationwide recrudescence in the early 1920's. I had seen dam foolishness from dance marathons to flagpole sitters, and had made considerable study of crowd behavior and mass delusions. I had noted, rather casually, the initial slow growth of anti - science - & - intellect - ism.
Yet the durned thing shocked me. Let me list some signs:
a) I CHING;
b) Back - to - nature cults;
c) The collapse of basic education;
d) The current respectability of natal horological astrology among "intelligentsia" - e.g. professors, N.Y. literary people, etc.;
e) "Experts" on nuclear power and nuclear weapons who know nothing whatever of mathematical physics and are smug in admitting it;
f) "Experts" on the ecology of northern Alaska who have never been there and are not mathematically equipped to analyze a problem in ecology;
g) People who watch television several hours a day and derive all their opinions there from - and expound them;
h) People who watch television several hours a day;
return of creationism - "Equal time for Yahweh) The return of witchcraft.
The mindless yahoos, people who think linearly like a savage instead of inductively or deductively, and people who used to be respectful to learned opinion or at least kept quiet, now are aggressively on the attack. Facts and logic don't count; their intuition is the source of "truth."
If any item on the above list strikes you as rational, I won't debate it with you; you are part of the problem.
But I will illustrate what I mean in categories where I think I might be misunderstood.
a) I CHING - easier than "reading the augurs" but with nothing else to recommend it. Chinese fortune cookies are just as as accurate - and you get to eat the cookie. Nevertheless this bit of oriental nonsense is treated with solemn seriousness by many "educated" people. It is popular enough to make profitable the sale of books, equipment, magazine articles, and personal instruction. Paralleling I CHING is the widespread use of Tarot cards. Fortunetelling by cards used to be a playful parlor game, a mating rite - a nubile girl limited by the vocabulary and public manners of the Mauve Decade could convey to a rutty young male almost any message by how she chose to "read his fortune" - with no impropriety. But neither he nor she took the cards seriously.