Gold bugs have a point. An ounce of gold bought a high-quality outfit in Ancient Rome, just as it buys an excellent suit today. As gold’s actual value remains steady, its enormously rising price highlights the massive inflation and currency devaluation that has occurred over many generations.

But the bugs are wrong in simply ascribing the devaluation of fiat currencies to governments “printing too much money”. Yes, fiat currencies do have a habit of disappearing to zero, but it’s for reasons other than excessive governmental spending.

In modern economies, commercial banks create over 90% of the money supply through lending; not governments. Much of this money goes into funding the price of land. Once it’s seen that land prices represent the private capitalisation of publicly-generated rent, we’ll understand that land prices are the very essence of inflation; as are taxes upon our sales and earnings.

Whilst modern economists and commentators find this terrain too difficult to cross, returning to Ancient Rome, we find that Edward Gibbon’s “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” touches upon the latifundia’s unequal distribution of land and the role of oppressive taxation in Rome’s decline, unfortunately without understanding this aspect of inflation to be integral to the collapse of every empire.

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Of course, this was just before the last financial depression.