February 3, 1934 - Article - Concerning Money, by Garet Garrett
It is supposed that we debate a monetary policy. The President speaks of Tories, foes and mules. A former candidate for President speaks of crackpots, guinea pigs and baloney. Ecclesiastics hurl economic imprecations from the pulpit; they speak of currency and Christ together in one accent of passion and become so excited that from opposite sides they denounce one another's personal and mental merits, being themselves divided on the money question, not by sect or denomination, but by whatever it is.
Much that passes for reasoning is inferior to the invective. An eminent United States Senator says, "The ones you hear howling about sound money are the ones who own securities" (Borah, N.Y. Times, Nov. 25). Those who hold for cheap money say, "Under your sacred gold standard we have had these frightful four years of economic depression." The answer is, "The prosperity you are trying in vain to restore with cheap money was prosperity under the gold standard."This is not reasoning, the answer no more than what is answered. You may have booms and depressions with any kind of money. The best of money will never save people from involving themselves in economic disaster by folly, whereas people who know how may manage very well with poor money. (pg. 5)
Only a few hundred years ago one who said the world was round and turned in space was a heretic, liable to be burned at the stake. In the middle of the seventeenth century the astronomer Galileo was obliged by the Inquisition at Rome to abjure the heresy of the sun's stability. Whether the earth went round the sun or the sun went round the earth, it would all look and feel the same; as touching people in any physical sense, it made no difference at all which was true. Over such a question, nevertheless, otherwise intelligent human beings burned and mutilated one another. Merely as a fanatical dispute about astronomical facts it makes no sense whatever. But it was never that. They were talking of celestial mechanics and thinking all the time of something entirely different. They could not accept the astronomical facts and still believe what they wished to believe, nor could they imagine believing what else they believed otherwise than as they believed it then, literally and simply. Therefore they were unwilling to face the facts. But certainly it was no state of astronomical facts that could move them so deeply, no question of the sun's stability that divided them to the point of frenzy. What moved them was fear, and this was nothing less than fear of losing heaven. (pg. 6)