Destroying Your Own Economy

This mistake is one made over and over by great nations and empires. It is hoped that our current leaders have learned from history. The mistake here is using inflation to pay the bills. Now, before the use of paper money, which was introduced hundreds of years ago by Muslim rulers to great success, all money was in coins. Today when we work with coins, the pureness is guaranteed and enforced, but it is easy to forget that this was not always the case. This is a mistake that history has seen time and time again. Perhaps the temptation is just too great. Recently Zimbabwe printed itself into a situation in which there were days when the value of its currency would halve every hour. The Weimar Republic, in post-World War I Germany, created hyperinflation by just printing all the money they needed and hence decreasing the deutschemark until it was effectively valueless. Weimar’s government was voted out of office, and the Nazis were voted in on the promise to fix the economy. We all paid a high price for that inflationary spiral. The caliphs made this same error, and it crippled Islam, ending its most vibrant and expansive period. But if you go even further back, you will find that this mistake was yet another factor that brought down both the original and later the Eastern Roman empires.