“Across the world, people are struggling under the specter of inflation,” says Jon Miltimore of the Foundation for Economic Education. We talk a lot about it’s economic impact, but Miltimore says it’s a lot deeper than that.

While the pernicious effects of inflation have been exhaustively detailed in recent years, one effect of inflation has received little attention: its impact on morality.

The idea that inflation could affect morality might sound strange to some readers; It certainly did to me when I first heard the hypothesis. Yet, one of the most famed economic writers in history saw a clear link between inflationary policy and corruption (both public and private).

“During every great inflation there is a striking decline in both public and private morality,” Henry Hazlitt, the author of Economics in One Lesson, once observed.

Like Miltimore, Hazlitt looked to history in other nations.

One of the authorities Hazlitt cites is the historian Andrew Dickson White (1832–1932), author of Fiat Money Inflation in France. …

In his work, White discusses how money printing in [Revolutionary] France led to not just monetary decay, but moral decay, and explains how it happened.

That can manifest in corruption, tyranny (in France, the Reign of Terror), and crime — the latter of which is what happened in Germany.

The hyperinflation Weimar Germany (1918–33) experienced during the early 1920s is well known. Less well known is the surge in crime during the inflationary period, though it’s something Hazlitt discussed.

Going back to Franch, Miltimore continues:

White’s point is that the tyranny in France did not come about accidentally. It stemmed directly from its monetary policy.

Figures from the French Revolution are hard to come by (especially if you don’t read French), but a new paper published in European Economic Review described France’s monetary policy as “an explosion of paper money called the assignat,” which resulted in a hyperinflation Europe would not experience again until the twentieth century.

White goes so far as to suggest that the horrors of the French Revolution were an unavoidable consequence of France’s inflationary policies.

Turning to America, he concludes:

I’ll leave it an open question for readers to decide whether the United States’ own expansion of the money supply has resulted in a collapse of private and public morality. Though I’ll point out that Hazlitt, writing during the Carter administration, argued that the rise of public immorality was already well underway, and that it stemmed directly from its debauched currency.

I also suspect that White, if the great scholar was alive today, would look at American society — its endless wars, public corruption, and questionable taxpayer-funded initiatives — and simply say, “I told you so.”