Does this sound like any other economist you are familiar with?
Thus, the population of the United States has increased during the past century at
the rate of about three per cent., or thirty per mille per
annum compounded. The money of the United States,
though not without frequent and injurious, if not dangerous,
fluctuations, appears to have augmented at the rate of about
thirty- three per mille per annum.
Another determinable quantity to which the actual in-
crease of money appears to have conformed is the net rate
of interest for money. This quantity is not so readily nor
easily determinable as the increase of population ; neverthe-
less it is determinable. The net rate of interest means the
average actual or market rate of interest, less risk, taxes,
and the cost of the superintendence of loans. This rate in
the United States has been and is still about thirty-three
per mille per annum.
Without as yet assuming that these indications offer a
practical solution to so difficult a problem, let it be sup-
posed that the money of the United States, instead of being
left, as it has been, to alternately expand or contract with
the commercial movements of bullion, the paper emissions
of banksand treasuries, the exigencies of governments, and
the contentions of party, had been regulated to augment at
the rate of thirty-three per mille per annum then these
results would have followed :
1. The country would have had, all along, substantially
the same amount of money that it has had ; only, instead of
alternately increasing and diminishing, in some years to
more than half the extent of its previous volume, it would
have augmented steadily at the rate of 3^ per cent, per
annum.
2. The reckless inflations,, speculations, and dishonest
transactions of 1814, 1819, 1829, 1837, 1857, and 1864
would not have occurred.
3. The contractions and stringencies that followed these
eras would not have been occasioned.
4. Nor would it have been necessary to legalise the dis-
graceful repudiations, nor to pass the stay-laws and bank-
ruptcy Acts which were enacted to relieve the distresses
occasioned by these contractions, and into which innocent
and honourable men were drawn, together with the design-
ing and dishonourable. |
