Ludwig von Mises on Money and Inflation.pdf - The Ludwig von ...

man newspaper with regard to economic problems, the FRANKFURTER
ZEITUNG, published an article in which it said: “You people who accept
this program of the Nazi Party of doing away with interest slavery,
do you know that you are creditors and not debtors” And they were, but
they didn’t know it. On the day when the FRANKFURTER ZEITUNG
published this article on its first page, I was on the way to London traveling
in the express train from one end of Germany to the other, from
the Austrian frontier of Germany to the Dutch frontier. I could observe
people reading this article and I told myself, “ey don’t understand these
things, and so they are bound to suffer the consequences.” And did they
suffer the consequences Of course! e mark became zero. is meant
that all the assets, all the savings of the people, the creditors, disappeared,
to the benefit of the debtors.
People in a country like the United States are saving in the years when
they are in full vigor and can earn money. ey are saving not only to
meet unexpected conditions which could develop one day; they are saving
systematically to enjoy income without working any longer in their
old age. For instance, people are taking out life insurance policies; they
are accumulating savings deposits; and they are making agreements with
their employers according to which their employers are bound to pay them
definite amounts as pension rights later; and so on. Now when there is
an inflation going on, all these people are suffering, suffering because they
are continually losing with the progress of inflation, because the progress
of inflation means that the purchasing power of the monetary unit decreases.
If we want to have a system in which the individual can plan for
his own life and for the life of his family, if we want to have a system in
which people can say: “If I have the opportunity to work and to save I
will improve my own conditions and the conditions of my family.” en
you must have a regular system of what one used to call “bourgeois security.”
But if the governments destroy the savings of their citizens again
and again by inflating they bring about a situation in which the people do
what these people in various European communist countries did and in
which you hear again and again of violence and actions of destruction.
e example of Germany may help you realize that there are still many
things to be learned about economic problems by everybody, not only by
the managers of big banks, professional editors of journals of business,
and so on. It is for this reason that I think everybody should be interested
in these problems, not because they are more important than other
things, nor on account of the fact that one should increase one’s theoreti-
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