Writes Brian Dunaway:

This column by Daniel Morena Vitonvia of The Mises Institute, posted on ZeroHedge, is among the most succinct, elegant writing I’ve seen on how inflation degrades the spiritual self. I was especially taken by these two passages:

“Saving, which is linked to sacrifice, also benefits the economy of giving, and deflation supports it – because falling prices discourage leverage, especially in households. As capital use becomes less profitable, the opportunity cost of making donations drops, which increases charitable giving both in absolute and relative terms. Inflation, by contrast, is harmful because it reduces the value of inheritances, and one of the strongest incentives to save before death is the desire to leave something to one’s loved ones. From this, it follows that one of the most powerful motivations for preserving wealth is the ability to make donations.”

And this distillation of Hülsmann, “Inflation is a hidden tax with devastating economic and moral consequences; it encourages the population to go into debt by making credit cheaper, and it penalizes saving, increasing the length of time preference. Not only that, but it is also a spiritual burden. It drives people to seek ways to protect their savings, making society more materialistic, causing people to prioritize money over happiness, and often forcing them to migrate, thereby breaking family and patriotic ties.” (Emphasis mine.)

I was really struck by the truth, “causing people to prioritize money over happiness.” When I was a young man, I used all the imagination I could muster to understand what it would be like to have great wealth. Aside from lustful adventures, what I imagined was awful. I thought to myself that I would be perpetually considering how best to protect my fortune. (I also considered that even if one creates new wealth, almost anything is psychologically normalized rather quickly, and that the greatest joys, physical and spiritual, require little to no money at all.) I recently read that William Kissam Vanderbilt (grandson of Cornelius), shortly before his death in 1920 (as reported in The New York Times), shared that “My life was never destined to be quite happy. … Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It is as certain a death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”

I’ve often felt that unhappiness is not just fathered by evil, but a synonym for it, even more so for the perpetrator than the victim. If the love of money is the root of all evil, so it is misery even more.