Ayn Rand's Egalitarianism and Inflation: Production to Consumption

In Ayn Rand's Egalitarianism and Inflation she demonstrates the consequences of the introduction of paper money into a thriving agrarian gold-based economy. And she shows how the resulting inflation actually destroys the real-world capital that had previously been accumulated by shifting society's focus from production to consumption.

"Now project what would happen to your community of a hundred hard-working, prosperous, forward-moving people, if one man were allowed to trade on your market, not by means of gold, but by means of paper—i.e., if he paid you, not with a material commodity, not with goods he had actually produced, but merely with a promissory note on his future production. This man takes your goods, but does not use them to support his own production; he does not produce at all—he merely consumes the goods. Then, he pays you higher prices for more goods—again in promissory notes—assuring you that he is your best customer, who expands your market.

"Then, one day, a struggling young farmer, who suffered from a bad flood, wants to buy some grain from you, but your price has risen and you haven’t much grain to spare, so he goes bankrupt. Then, the dairy farmer, to whom he owed money, raises the price of milk to make up for the loss—and the truck farmer, who needs the milk, gives up buying the eggs he had always bought—and the poultry farmer kills some of his chickens, which he can’t afford to feed—and the dairy farmer can’t afford the higher price of alfalfa, so he cancels his order to the blacksmith—and you want to buy the new plow you have been saving for, but the blacksmith has gone bankrupt. Then all of you present the promissory notes to your “best customer,” and you discover that they were promissory notes not on his future production, but on yours—only you have nothing left to produce with. Your land is there, your structures are there, but there is no food to sustain you through the coming winter, and no stock seed to plant.

"Would it make any difference if that community consisted of a thousand farmers? A hundred thousand? A million? The entire globe? No matter how widely you spread the blight, no matter what a variety of products and what an incalculable complexity of deals become involved, this, dear readers, is the cause, the pattern, and the outcome of inflation."