The Value of MoneyAnderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
General
The Value of Money
Anderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
Money
These two lists are quite different, and indicate that in Fisher's mind
the magnitudes, T and the V's, in general obey different laws. The only
factor in both lists is facilities for transportation ("rapidity of
transportation," in the first list). Strangely enough, T, though later
recognized as having influence on the V's[216] is not included in these
lists in ch. 5. The "character of the monetary and banking systems" in
the second list is evidently not the same as "use of checks" in the
second list, though it will doubtless affect that factor, as also the
"habits as to thrift and hoarding," in some degree. "Business
confidence," which is, in the view I am maintaining, as in the view, I
should take it, of Horace White, the great variable affecting both T and
the V's, does not appear in the first list. Indeed, one wonders why
business confidence appears in either list, if only "normal," and not
merely "transitional" causes are to be considered, but it appears from
the fuller discussion on p. 78 that Fisher is not thinking of business
confidence as a _variable_ at all--his normal theory has nothing to do
with _variables_--but as a thing which either is or is not present, a
sort of Mendelian unit, not a thing of degrees.[217] It will be noted,
further, that most of the causes which Fisher lists as affecting T are
really causes affecting _production_--they would be just as important
under a socialistic as under an exchange economy.
Now I propose to show, on the basis of Fisher's own list of causes, that
most, if not all, of the factors affecting the V's, will also affect T,
_and in the same direction_. He admits this as to transportation
facilities. It is surely true of thrift and hoarding. The miser neither
circulates money nor buys goods. It is emphatically true--though
Fisher's theory, as will later appear, is obliged to deny it,--of both
book credit and banking facilities. Without the use of credit, much of
the business now done simply would not be done at all. For Fisher, and
the quantity theory in general, the contention would be simply that the
same business would be done _on a lower price-level_. I reserve a full
discussion of this fundamental point till later, noting here, in
passing, that the function of banks is to assist in effecting transfers,
that that is why, from the social standpoint, banks are encouraged, and
that the extension of banking would be folly if they did not, in fact,
do this. As to book credit, let us suppose that, for example, in the
great cotton section of the South the stores should cease to give
advances of supplies on credit to negroes and small white farmers,
pending the "making" of the crop. The outcome would be starvation for
many of them, and no cotton crop at all. Under a system of private
enterprise, the very division of labor itself, including the
specialization of the capitalist, involves credit, and it is difficult
to conceive a form of credit which does not either dispense with the use
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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