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

e government increases the quantity of money. All the evils under
which we are suffering in our market conditions everyday are due to the
fact that governments believe that it is permissible and natural to produce
money to increase the power of the government to spend. In order to
spend more, the governments have to do practically nothing but give an
order to a printing office: “Print a quantity of money and give it to us.”
If private citizens do this, the government doesn’t like it. ere are many
printing offices in the country; most of these printing offices are in the
position to print dollar bills. What prevents the individual citizen from
printing dollar bills, banknotes, is a series of laws which make this a crime,
and the government is powerful enough to prevent it by arresting the people
and imprisoning them, and so on. But if the government itself prints
additional dollars, then it is legal and it increases the quantity of money.
And this is the monetary problem. Apart from the fact that this brings
about a very bad situation for those people who were not receivers of the
new additional money, because they have not received more money, they
now face higher prices.
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