to 1896 in common with the price levels of other gold-standard countries, nor would it have suffered the rapid rise which the units of silver-standard countries experienced. It would have kept intermediate between the diverging price movements of gold countries, on the one hand, and silver countries, on the other.
But such an alloy of only two commodities, while in many cases it would be steadier than either one alone, and in all cases steadier than the less steady of the two, would not really be very steady.
A composite of gold, silver, copper, platinum, and all the other metals would be somewhat more stable than an alloy of two, just as a number of tipsy men can walk more steadily arm in arm than two only, it being wholly unlikely that all men in the line will lurch in the same direction at the same instant. The lurching of some in one direction can almost always be depended on to offset materially the lurching of others in the other direction. We can usually trust to chance if there are enough chances to trust to!
But why use metals exclusively? The index numbers of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the group of "metals and metal products," taken as a whole, is the most erratic of all the groups[1] of commodities.
In order to secure a dollar constant in its purchasing power over goods in general, it should represent a composite of those very goods in general. We should therefore make our gold dollar correspond in value to an imaginary composite goods-dollar consisting, say, of:
- ↑ The groups are nine, namely: farm products; food, etc.; cloths and clothing; fuel and lighting; metals and metal products; lumber and building materials; drugs and chemicals; house furnishing goods; and miscellaneous.
