From salt riots to toilet paper runs, history shows that rising prices make consumers—and voters—grumpy and irrational.
by Eric Boehm
Reason.com
When Russian peasants set fire to hundreds of buildings in Moscow in 1648, the acute cause was a sharp rise in the price of salt. When they rioted again 12 years later, it was to protest a government policy that made copper money equal in value to coins made from silver—a policy that naturally caused widespread price inflation.
An increase in the price of bread, and an inept government response to it, helped set the French Revolution on its bloody course.
Periodic violence targeting Jews and other minority groups throughout European history has been linked to inflation and other sources of economic instability. The most infamous and horrific of those incidents, of course, began as an attempt to scapegoat Jews for the spike in inflation that plagued Germany in the wake of World War I. American history, too, is littered with panics, riots, and upheaval caused by sudden rises in prices and the public’s perception that they are being ripped off. In the early days of the American experiment, indebted Massachusetts farmers took up arms against the new federal government’s monetary policies. Two centuries later, dozens of farmers drove their tractors to the front door of the Federal Reserve in downtown D.C. to protest rising costs.