và kết luận nhất thiết phải rút ra từ chúng. Nhận thức luận, một thời gian dài đã được quan tâm duy nhất với toán học và vật lý, và chỉ sau đó bắt đầu chuyển sự chú ý của mình để sinh học và lịch sử cũng, được trình bày rõ ràng với những khó khăn không thể vượt qua bởi các dị hợp lý và phương pháp luận của lý thuyết kinh tế. | Chapter Twenty-Two THE MIRAGE OF INFLATION I have found it necessary to warn the reader from time to time that a certain result would necessarily follow from a certain policy provided there is no inflation. In the chapters on public works and on credit I said that a study of the complications introduced by inflation would have to be deferred. But money and monetary policy form so intimate and sometimes so inextricable a part of every economic process that this separation even for expository purposes was very difficult and in the chapters on the effect of various government or union wage policies on employment profits and production some of the effects of differing monetary policies had to be considered immediately. Before we consider what the consequences of inflation are in specific cases we should consider what its consequences are in general. Even prior to that it seems desirable to ask why inflation has been constantly resorted to why it has had an immemorial popular appeal and why its siren music has tempted one nation after another down the path to economic disaster. The most obvious and yet the oldest and most stubborn error on which the appeal of inflation rests is that of confusing money with wealth. That wealth consists in money or in gold and silver wrote Adam Smith nearly two centuries ago is a popular notion which naturally arises from the double function of money as the instrument of commerce and as the measure of value. . To 148 THE MIRAGE OF INFLATION grow rich is to get money and wealth and money in short are in common language 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 and books. Yet so powerful is the verbal ambiguity that confuses money with wealth that even those who at times recognize the confusion will
