The Theory of Money and Credit - Ludwig von Mises [195]
It was a serious blunder of the supporters of sound money to adopt such tactics. There is no use in dealing in a summary way with any ideology however foolish and contradictory it may appear Even a manifestly erroneous doctrine should be refuted by careful analysis and the unmasking of the fallacies implied. A sound doctrine can win only by exploding the delusions of its adversaries.
The essential principles of the sound-money doctrine were and are impregnable. But their scientific support in the last decades of the nineteenth century was rather shaky. The attempts to demonstrate their reasonableness from the point of view of the Classical value theory were not very convincing and made no sense at all when this value concept had to be discarded. But the champions of the new value theory for almost half a century restricted their studies to the problems of direct exchange and left the treatment of money and banking to routinists unfamiliar with economics. There were treatises on catallactics which dealt only incidentally and cursorily with monetary matters, and there were books on currency and banking which did not even attempt to integrate their subject into the structure of a catallactic system. [1] Finally the idea evolved that the modern doctrine of value, the subjectivist or marginal utility doctrine, is unable to explain the problems of money's purchasing power. [2]
It is easy to comprehend how under such circumstances even the least tenable objections raised by the advocates of inflationism remained unanswered. The gold standard lost popularity because for a very long time no serious attempts were made to demonstrate its merits and to explode the tenets of its adversaries.
2 The Virtues and Alleged Shortcomings of the Gold Standard
The excellence of the gold standard is to be seen in the fact that it renders the determination of the monetary unit's purchasing power independent of the policies of governments and political parties. Furthermore, it prevents rulers from eluding the financial and budgetary prerogatives of the representative assemblies. Parliamentary control of finances works only if the government is not in a position to provide for unauthorized expenditures by increasing the circulating amount of fiat money. Viewed in this light, the gold standard appears as an indispensable implement of the body of constitutional guarantees that make the system of representative government function.
When in the 'fifties of the nineteenth century gold production increased considerably in California and Australia, people attacked the gold standard as inflationary. In those days Michel Chevalier, in his book Probable Depreciation of Gold, recommended the abandonment of the gold standard, and Béranger dealt with the same subject in one of his poems. But later these criticisms subsided. The gold standard was no longer denounced as inflationary but on the contrary as deflationary. Even the most fanatical champions of inflation like to disguise their true intentions by declaring that they merely want to offset the contractionist pressure which the allegedly insufficient supply of gold tends to produce.
Yet it is clear that over the last generations there has prevailed a tendency of all commodity prices and wage rates to rise. We may neglect dealing with the economic effects