de la unidad monetaria, lo cual demuestra cuán esencial es como principio en el tráfico comercial la supuesta invariabilidad de la unidad monetaria."
El uso consagrado por la ley decide que, cuando los precios varían, se considera que la variación ocurre en el valor de las mercancías vendibles, no en el valor de la unidad monetaria, ya que el dinero es el patrón de valor. No hay, por supuesto, ninguna intención aquí de cuestionar la postura, familiar para todos los economistas, de que las fluctuaciones en el curso de los precios bien pueden deberse
Economists are in the habit of speaking of money as a medium of exchange, a "great wheel" for the circulation of goods. In the same connection business traffic is spoken of as a means of obtaining goods suitable for consumption, the end of all purchase and sale being consumable goods, not money values. It may be true in a profound philosophical sense that money values are not the definitive term of business endeavor, and that the business man seeks through the mediation of money to satisfy his craving for consumable goods. Looking at the process of economic life as a whole and taking it in its rationalized bearing as a collective endeavor to purvey goods and services for the needs of collective humanity, the office of the money unit — money transactions, exchange, credit, and all the rest that make up the phenomena of business — is perhaps justly rated as something subsidiary, serving to facilitate the distribution of consumable goods to the consumers, the consumption of goods being the objective point of all this traffic. Such is the view of this matter given by the rationalistic, normalizing speculations of the eighteenth-century philosophers ; and such is, in substance, the view spoken for by those economists who still