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146 Economics in One Lessonwealth. “That wealth consists in money, or in gold and silver,” wroteAdam Smith nearly two centuries ago,is a popular notion which naturally arises from the doublefunction of money, as the instrument of commerce,and as the measure of value. . . . To grow rich is to getmoney; and wealth and money, in short, are, in commonlanguage, considered as in every respect synonymous.Real wealth, of course, consists in what is produced and consumed:the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in.It is railways and roads and motor cars; ships and planes and factories;schools and churches and theaters; pianos, paintings, andbooks. Yet so powerful is the verbal ambiguity that confuses moneywith wealth, that even those who at times recognize the confusionwill slide back into it in the course of their reasoning. Each mansees that if he personally had more money he could buy morethings from others. If he had twice as much money he could buytwice as many things; if he had three times as much money hewould be “worth” three times as much. And to many the conclusionseems obvious that if the government merely issued moremoney and distributed it to everybody, we should all be that muchricher.These are the most naive inflationists. There is a second group,less naive, who see that if the whole thing were as easy as that thegovernment could solve all our problems merely by printing money.They sense that there must be a catch somewhere; so they wouldlimit in some way the amount of additional money they would havethe government issue. They would have it print just enough to makeup some alleged “deficiency” or “gap.”Purchasing power is chronically deficient, they think, becauseindustry somehow does not distribute enough money to producers toenable them to buy back, as consumers, the product that is made.There is a mysterious “leak” somewhere. One group “proves” it byequations. On one side of their equations they count an item only