78-09-A7
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Transcript[edit]Ben Stein, an author and former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, currently writes for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He offered an interesting bit of information in that paper about a month ago. Two years ago he wrote a book in which he described a hypothetical economic disaster befalling America in the early '80's. In writing the book, he had done extensive research on the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic in Germany. That was a time in the early 20's when people literally hauled money around in wheel barrows when they shopped, and very often the wheel barrow was worth more than the money. In those five years, Germany went through an inflation of one trillion per cent. Yes, I said one trillion. Employers paid workers every hour so they could rush out and buy things before the prices went up. I remember, as a boy, being given a 50 million mark note by a visitor returning from Germany. It was worth about one American penny. In his research, Ben Stein learned that the denominations on postage stamps increased so rapidly that to avoid the expense of constantly changing them, the German government decided to issue stamps bearing simple letters of the alphabet. This not only avoided the psychological upset of putting out stamps bearing a price of one billion marks or so, but they could sell the A or the B stamp for whatever the new price right be each day and save printing new stamps. I know it seems impossible that any nation could go through and survive such a wild and unbelievable inflation, but it happened. And, possibly because of the post-war bitterness we felt toward Germany, Americans joked about what was happening over there. Right now I don't particularly feel like joking -- certainly not about postage stamps without prices and just letters of the alphabet on them. Take a look at our new 15 cent stamps. It doesn't say 15 cents; there is just the letter "A". Ben Stein reached two members of the White House press office by phone. That isn't hard to do because the White House press aides outnumber the National Security Council. When he asked why the stamps bore the letter "A", the answer was "Well, it's so that if we have to raise the price we won't have to print a lot of new stamps." Now I'm sure Ben Stein wasn't trying to frighten the readers of his newspaper with images of billion dollar stamps, but he was, in a sense, uttering a warning. Indeed, he quoted an old family friend, an Austrian economist who had lived through that German inflation, who said of us "You are going down that path, too." This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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