Jim Grant on Irving Fisher and his desire to smooth out the boom-and-bust cycle

[Irving] Fisher was a man of few doubts and boundless energy.  He advocated for public health (with all the authority of the tuberculosis survivor that he was), prohibition, common stocks, eugenics, longevity through vegetarianism, Indian meditation - and government economic management.  An enlightened central bank could neutralize booms and busts alike by controlling the stock of money, or so he proposed.

Fisher rejected the Bryanite campaign for lots of silver dollars.  But he did not reject the notion that the quantity of money was of the utmost importance in determining prices and wages.  Neither did he share his contemporaries' fatalism with respect to the cycles of credit and business.

Stability was the ticket, he said.  The price level should neither rise nor fall but should remain the same.  Justice to debtors and creditors demanded it.  And enlightened central bankers might achieve it.  The age of laissez-faire was over, declared Fisher in 1906.

~ James Grant, The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself (2014), p. 28