Essays in Idleness

After consulting the charts, I have had to revise the divisor I had been using for the last several years. I had been dividing the number of dollars I could find — in my pockets, pillows, and elsewhere in my flat — by twenty. This, to remain constantly reminded of the stable world, before 1914: the last year in which sanity was available to the fiscal authorities in the Western world. I found that I would now need twenty-seven dollars to match the 1914 value of one dollar, at the beginning of the XXth-century Great Inflation.

Some quick-witted gliberals will argue that the price of computers, and some other technical marvels, has actually come down. Had general inflation not been so high, they would have come down farther.

Within the British Empire, before it collapsed, our money had held its value pretty much continuously since the death of Henry VIII — the great betrayer also of the Catholic Church, and an erotic murderer. Similarly, the Middle Ages had been an age of sound money, in the main, this far west of Constantinople. Thus it was never necessary for us to collapse the money value; we (British) merely twice lapsed into worthlessness.

The modern decline in value would have been much worse except for the deflationary episodes just after the Great War, and through the Great Depression in the early ‘thirties. Indeed, except for these corrections, during which the dark, intentional Keynesian slide was resisted, the inflation multiple might be much, much higher. It is a reminder that all but one or two of our central bank governors, through the last century or so, deserved firing, and probably execution. Their job was to defend our currency, but instead they turned it into waste paper and easily corroded base metals.

So, now I am dividing my worldly substance by twenty-seven, which is more awkward than dividing by twenty, or the convenient ten times when Trudeau père was first elected. This might also be taken as a measure of our Progress. We have progressed now twenty-seven times.