by Joseph T. Salerno
Mises.org
Economists and historians have clearly shown that the destruction of the value and function of money by hyperinflation makes economic calculation impossible and leads to economic and social disintegration and widespread poverty. What is not so clearly understood, even by many economists, is that during periods of rapid inflation, the inability to economically calculate undermines the very nature of property and causes a withering of the human personality, which is intimately connected with property ownership. By eliminating the means of appraising and rationally allocating one’s property, hyperinflation eliminates the very basis of independent human existence and personality under a system of social cooperation. The inevitable result is the dissolution of the society of voluntary contract and its replacement by a hegemonic order in which property and personality are collectivized.
The central role of money and property in the formation of the individual human personality under the division of labor has yet to be investigated in any depth, and I will not attempt to do this here. However, I will note that in speaking of the human personality, I am referring to what has been called, usually derisively, the “bourgeois personality.”