Let me tell you something that actually happened.
Not a parable. Not a thought experiment dressed up as history. A real country, real people, real numbers you can still look up. Germany, the autumn of 1923. I want you to sit inside it for a minute, because almost everything you believe about money is hiding in this single episode, and almost no one who lives through their own version of it ever notices.
By the autumn of 1923, the German mark had stopped being money in any meaningful sense. Prices were not rising. They were detonating. A loaf of bread that cost a couple of marks before the war cost hundreds of billions by November. Workers were paid twice a day and ran to spend it at noon, because by evening the same wage bought half as much. People burned banknotes for warmth, because the paper was worth less than the firewood it could buy. Cafés posted prices that changed between the order and the bill. An entire society watched, in real time, the destruction of the thing it had spent …
