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Illustration: Women’s March on Versailles, October 5, 1789; public domainWhen 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.It may be tempting to dismiss the unsettling history that links high inflation with political unrest and aggressive xenophobia. Americans living today are the richest cohort of human beings ever to inhabit the planet. Surely we’re not as susceptible to the psychological effects of inflation as our forebears, for whom a spike in the price of basic goods might be a matter of life and death?And yet we may not be as far removed from Russian serfs or Weimar Germans as we’d like to think. Just look at the panick …
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