HKB
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Often appears with: value, price, and exchange · montesquieu · money, coin, and credit · locke · lawe · fate, destiny, and necessity
Usually: argument (1) · skepticism (1)
“If £100 are in those countries now of no more value than £50 were then, £10 must now be of no more value than £5 were then.” Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth · vivid
Smith criticizes claims that Spanish silver discoveries lowered interest in Europe, offering an arithmetical argument that if silver's value fell, the capital-interest proportion would not change.
to say any thing more about it. The following very short and plain argument, however, may serve to explain more distinctly the fallacy which seems to have misled those gentlemen. Before the discovery of the Spanish West Indies, ten per cent. seems to have been the common rate of interest through the greater part of Europe. It has since that time, in different countries, sunk to six, five, four, and…