There’s increasing gloom and doom about how bad things are. Often, whose who tend to worry get gloomy about how drastically the dollar is declining. Some, in fact, are reluctant to make long term investments, even to buy life insurance. “What’s the point?”, they ask. Many agree: “The dollar has lost over 90% of its worth since the Federal Reserve started.” Some who participate in such discussions enjoy what is sometimes a contest to see who can succeed in being the most depressing.
Sometimes, some in the discussion will announce, “The dollar is dropping so fast that I don’t even bother to save any money. In fact, I think it’s better not to have cash.” Such people almost invariably succeed in not having any, but rarely attribute it to their own profligacy. Blaming “the Fed”, and various other villains, is so much more enjoyable.
Negative thinking reflects a depressing attitude that can infect a life with depression. In many ways, the actual value of a dollar is so high that we can hardly imagine it.
Once, in the 1930’s the only child of an extraordinarily wealthy man, a distant relative by marriage, got erysipelas, a common infection. Despite the millions of dollars this very, very rich man could and would have cheerfully spent to cure the disease, his many millions of dollars did not have the power to keep his son alive.
Today, part of a dollar has so much value it can pay for manufacturing enough penicillin to cure what would have been a fatal case of erysipelas. A few dollars have enough purchasing power for the production of even more powerful antibiotics. Erysipelas can be cured so quickly that virtually no one dies of it in the United States.
A cheerful soul could reasonably conclude that today’s dollars actually have more value than ever.
