The Dollar Is Still A Dollar And Other Interesting Essays

Excerpt from The Dollar Is Still a Dollar: And Other Interesting Essays The dollar has not lost any of its commer cial value, for it never had any such value to lose. Its legitimate function is to transfer the ownership Of'a given amount of the products of labor from one person to an other, as wagons are used to transfer theproducts themselves from one place to an other. The one and only trouble with the dollar is that it has been overloaded by the toll Of the beast. The dollar can only transfer a dollar's worth of the products from one person to another, and not two or three dollars' worth, and just as the wagon of a given capacity cannot carry a load equal to three times its capacity. The wagon would break down under its load. The dollar is breaking, down under its load. But it has lost none of its value, and just as the yardstick has lost none of its length, or the pound any of its weight. These all remain the same as before the beast showed his abnormal appetite for gain. The dollar has lost none of its value. Its trans ferring power is written on its face! This has not been changed! The beast has overloaded it. That is all. The dollar is a measuring unit, used as a gauge to measure out to you so much of the products of labor. It has no other value. We could have yardsticks made of gold and weights made of this same metal, but this would not make them any more valuable for the purpose for which they are in tended. And we could have wagons made of rare wood and inlaid with gold, but this would add no value to them for the purpose used. And we might write notes on gold plates, but this would add no value to these notes. They would only be worth their face value, no more. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Rather than relaxed and comfortable, Australians are disenchanted with politics and politicians. In Quarterly Essay 46 Laura Tingle shows that the reason for this goes to something deep in Australian culture: our great expectations of government. Since the deregulation era of the 1980s, Tingle finds, governments can do less, but we wish they could do more. From Hawke to Gillard, each prime minister has grappled with this dilemma. Keating sought to change expectations, Howard to feed a culture of entitlement, Rudd to reconceive the federation. Through all of this, and back to our origins, runs an almost childlike sense of the government as saviour and provider that has remained constant even as the world has changed. Now we are an angry nation, and the Age of Entitlement is coming to an end. What will a different politics look like? And, Tingle asks, even if a leader surfs the wave of anger all the way to power, what answer can be given to our great expectations? “It is wrong to see the anger of the last few years as a ‘one-off,’ which might go away at the next election. The things we are angry about betray the changes that have been taking place over recent decades. Politicians no longer control interest rates, the exchange rate, or wages, prices or industries that were once protected or even owned by government. Voters are confused about what politicians can do for them in such a world.” —Laura Tingle, Great Expectations