Scrooge McDuck, aka Uncle $crooge, is the richest duck in the world. He first appeared in 1947 as a lonely, hard-edged miser in the Donald Duck comic, Christmas on Bear Mountain, by Carl Barks. Scrooge McDuck later developed into a leading Disney character as the impossibidillionaire with a softened, more generous and compassionate personality.
So what can we learn from Uncle Scrooge? Well, the following clip from 1967 short, Scrooge McDuck and Money, shows Scrooge giving his great-nephews a lesson on monetary inflation.
“Uncle Scrooge, why don’t they just print up a few billion or so?”
“Unless something’s behind it … something solid and secure, we’d have inflation. … Your money would be worth less and less. … It’s what you can buy with what you’ve got — that’s what counts!”
Another clip from the later series, Duck Tales, gives a more detailed illustration of the effects of monetary inflation. In it, Scrooge’s great-nephews learn the hard lesson that “you can never get something for nothing.”
When the nephews stumble upon a new invention called the Multiphonic Duplicator — a machine that can duplicate anything — they immediately realize they can make themselves rich by duplicating their money. But as the “funny money” duplication gets out of hand, the kids witness the destruction caused to the market in real-time. Scrooge finds out and he’s not happy.
“Oh no! Don’t tell me you boys have been spending duplicated money!”
“Sure, what’s wrong with that?”
“Don’t you see? If everyone has it, it loses value. Prices will go up, then everyone will have to have more and more money. It’ll be chaos!”
Another interesting bit of Uncle Scrooge history:
Carl Barks went on to create one of Scrooge’s main rival characters, John D. Rockerduck. The two personalities clashed with each other. Rockerduck was born into his wealth and was a liberal spending braggart of luxury. Scrooge, on the other hand, was a self-made man who came up as a humble shoe-shining immigrant. This rivalry was no doubt an allusion to the real-life rivalry of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
On the subject of those two, I leave you with a great clip of Tom Woods smashing the myth of the Robber Barons.