"The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians."
— Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, 1946
Economics in One Lesson has probably made more free-market thinkers than any other book of its century, and it does so with a single idea: trace a policy past its immediate and visible effect to its longer and wider consequences, and past the group it obviously helps to the groups it quietly does not.
Applied to money, that lesson yields the sentence on this mug. A politician who can adjust the quantity of money holds a lever whose first effects are pleasant and highly visible, and whose later effects are painful, diffuse, and reliably arrive after the next election.
