this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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[–] gataloca 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No I'm not. Prices for products or services drive inflation. Consumer price index (which inflation is) is literally derived from goods.

But even from a less pedantic point of view and examining the causes for inflation, wages are only a small part of what determines the price for a product. Wages among the people who extract rubber for your tires are extremely low and fixed by the buyers of this rubber. The local buyer then processes it and takes a markup, but the huge price increases is when they in turn need to sell the processed rubber to world corporations and they buy it for extremely cheap and then toss in a huge markup and sell it to the west. The meaningful wages in the product that goes directly to workers might be as low as 10% of the price of the final product.

The ultimate goal here is to costs, and primarily wages so they can extract a maximum amount of surplus value from the workers, and there's nothing in this world that guarantees that workers will be paid a certain percentage or even a reasonable amount. The claim you make is downright laughable because it's so wrong both in practice and theory.

Therefore, the claim that wages are the only drivers for inflation or even the primary driver is a complete lie! We are drained for billions of dollars to the capitalist parasite class every step in the production chain until it's finally distributed. This extraction is so valuable that entire countries can be financed through VAT alone.

It's truly disheartening that there are still people like you roaming around and spreading misinformation and citing neoliberal think tank pseudoscience.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Inflation refers to the increase in the monetary supply without at least a corresponding increase in the available amount of goods and services. It's this increase (inflation) in the monetary supply that causes the increase (inflation) in prices.

[–] gataloca 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That's a basic understanding of inflation that is taught to children in elementary school, but it's not correct as I've explained to you earlier. Also people don't set prices or wages from the money supply for the simple fact that pretty much nobody knows how large money supply is compared to their good or service or what the price of wage should be compared to the money supply.

In fact it's entirely divorced from the money supply which we can see an example of in the rampant price increases of property which haven't followed inflation but rather increased unproportionally fast.