Antiwork

I think there's a lot of historical inaccuracies in your post as far as what the intention behind inflation was.

Keep in mind this was an idea developed at the end of the Great depression to prevent wealth hoarding and economic stagnation.

Inflation isn't the issue. And the people I usually find pointing to it as the issue are libertarians who are angling to go back to the gold standard.

As someone else said wages not going up is the issue. And we could have avoided a lot of inequality in the world today had they tied minimum wage to inflation to begin with during the new deal.

I think that was an oversight. Because the intention of minimum wage was always that it'd be livable.

Freezing inflation wouldn't change the fact that a dollar invested in an asset will have a higher rate of return than a dollar that's just sitting under your mattress doing nothing.

That is a desired feature of the economy -- that people are rewarded for investing their money instead of just keeping it out of circulation indefinitely.

The real problem here is that ordinary people can't afford assets because the wealthy have basically all of them. Tax the heck out of the wealthy, to the point where they must sell their assets.

Then ordinary people can buy those assets.

Probably using financing, which is aided by inflationary currency by the way.

Suppose you buy a 300k house on a fixed-rate 30-year mortgage. Let's check back in 20 years. That house is worth way more than 300k now, but your outstanding principal is something like 150k, which in 2044-dollars is chump change. Your monthly payments at that point are a breeze compared to now.

Yes, assets are protected from inflation more than cash is. Yes, the rich have all the assets, so they're protected from inflation.

No, the solution is not to eliminate inflation.

The solution is to take back the assets which have been stolen from the working class over the past 60 years. Tax the wealthy. Severely.

This works because people consider their own labor to have a fixed value. i.e.: they are willing to work a full week to just barely survive. They don't participate, or consider themselves to participate, in the ever-increasing value of their product, but just trade their daytime liberty for food and rent. Aggravated by propaganda like "you should be glad to have any job," and "you need to do whatever it takes to survive."

The counter to this is organization. Wages negotiated by leaders insulated from the threat of immediate eviction or starvation, who understand growing productivity, and can negotiate on an equal footing with the organized representatives of capital.

There’s a lot of talk about inflation and its causes. Is it corporate greed?

Yes

One clear base cause of inflation less talked about is having an inflationary currency supply. Any other inflation caused by supply chain issues, corporate greed, lack of market competition, etc is just added on top of that.

In the sense of you add a million to two, the "base" is two and the million is "just added on top of that," sure. Monopolization and price gouging are by far the larger factors.

How is that the case? Shouldn’t it cost less? Where is that “extra efficiency” going if not to lower prices? The answer:

Corporate pockets.

Poor people live hand to mouth, so their net wealth is not impacted much, but inflationary currency prevents them from saving and “moving up”.

Complete nonsense. And extra 2% interest is not the root cause of poverty. You actually missed the real way in which inflation can hurt the poor which is when corporations don't increase wages with inflation, which is effectively a pay cut. This is a form of class warfare which they are able to do because they are more powerful and better organized, as a class, than labor is.

There’s a great book, Capital In The 21st Century, that goes into a lot of detail on why inflation is common in modern economies despite there being large stretches of time just a few centuries ago without any noticeable inflation.

The author’s argument is that inflation benefits governments that are in debt. If the government owes a trillion dollars that has to be paid off over a 100 year loan, the government has the tools to raise inflation over that time span to where a trillion dollars is no longer a lot of money. And during that 100 years the government can just keep paying the minimum interest payment and let the rest of the loan become worthless overtime.

For us regular folk, we can get some of the same advantages with fixed interest loans over 30 years, etc.

Inflation is not purely a boon to the capitalists and rich. If you're a working class person with a student loan, or mortgage or any type of long term debt you benefit from inflation as the value of that debt goes down over time. Meanwhile if your the bank holding that debt then inflation hurts you as the bond backed by that debt will go down in value over time. So assets that are backed by loans (bonds) go down in value while assets backed by equity( % ownership in a company/stocks, real estate etc) are uneffected like you said. This is why a lot of capitalists favor static or even deflationary currency as the value of their bonds will go up while not effecting their stocks. Deflation for the poor though can result in debt traps, where the value of the debt you owe goes up over time and makes it impossible to get out of, which is great for banks, the longer your paying minimum payments and interest without touching the principle the better. This is why populists in the western u.s. demanded inflation in the late nineteenth century because they were drowning in unpayable mortgages, and the rich eastern bankers refused since they were raking in all the money from those mortgages.

Also you're putting the cart before the horse, inflation is caused by a lot of things, but one of the main causes, and the main cause in this last round, is rising wages, not some government conspiracy. If we're looking at the economy from a Marxist view that when an item is sold a certain amount of it goes to fixed costs, a certain amount goes to labor and a certain amount goes to capital. If say a toothbrush costs $5 , and $3 goes to fixed costs, $1 goes to the laborer who made it and $1 goes to the capitalist who owns it. Now say that laborer uses there new labor power obtained from unionizing or surviving a pandemic that put a lot of people out of the labor pool they can demand an increase in their wage, say to $2. This extra dollar can't come out of the fixed costs, ideally it would come out of the capitalist share, but since the capitalist controls the price they will just raise that, and maybe add bit extra. So the laborer has to deal with increased prices, so they demand more wages which creates a feedback loop leading to ever increasing inflation.

In this sense inflation is the natural result of class conflict in a capitalist system where capital controls the prices. The government in this case is usually tasked with reigning in inflation rather than creating it. Early on in the Nixon years this was done through price controls and wage controls, neither capital or labor could increase there price. Nowadays it's done through interest rates to cause or at least make people think there's a recession so that labor will stop asking for higher wages.

Liking fiat money, is definitely a red flag. I agree.

Thousands of people have bled and died to give us the 40 hour work week. 150 years ago there were 12 year old kids working 16 hours per day in coal mines, 6-7 days per week. Be happy for the rights you have today. If the rights you have today aren't enough for you, then you will need to organize and fight for changes. These changes don't come quick, free, or easy.

You're not working against inflation, you're working against the 7 billion other people who want your food, shelter and luxuries.

The problem isn't the value of your currency, it's your lack of bargaining power in the face of competition and entrenched interests.

Yes. You get it.

There are a lot of boogymen. Capitalism. Billionaires. But if you understand the difference between capital and money, you know what's going on. The parasites (many of which are billionaires, but not all) use the government to move capital from regular people to themselves using the cantillion effect, which is done by devaluing the currency. It's a form of wealth redistribution. It was used during the pandemic with the stimulus to redistribute wealth to everyone, but has since been reversed.

What's really interesting is how this is used to move industry around globally. Really crazy stuff.

If you want to save yourself from it, the only way, the only way, is to store your savings in a highly liquid medium that can't be debased. It doesn't matter what economic system you want or live under. If potatoes didn't rot, you'd be better off storing them then any money.

Those of you that don't get it: learn the difference between money and capital. Learn what it means to own plants that are growing in the ground. You can become a millionaire just planting trees, without so much as a dollar in your pocket. When the measure is elastic at the whim of someone else, if you measure your success using it they own you. You can escape slavery by measuring your success using a different yardstick.