Inflation
No matter how often this is said, there is no way everyone will believe it.
But I say it over and over because each time one or two folks may come around to the view.
The economic era 1980-today is about declining inflation, declining wages, declining welfare, and increasing inequality.
Inflation is not the enemy of working people. It is the enemy of the rich.
Working people do not own money. They own a commodity. (future labor)
Rich people own money.
Given the choice between the value of money increasing (deflation) or the value of commodities increasing (inflation) the rich prefer the former.
Lowering inflation drives finance and financial services, versus industry. In a relatively deflationary world you make money by playing with money. You buy a bond paying 3.5%. Inflation never shows up. You win! You write a mortgage charging 5% interest. If inflation never shows up, you win!
Borrowers want future inflation. Lenders do not. Who has held the whip hand most of our lives?
Here are mortgage rates since the 1970s.
You will notice that inflation expectations have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk since 1980-1982. During that period things have also gotten harder and harder for the working class, and income inequality has sky-rocketed. It is not a big cosmic coincidence. The two are connected.
Demand for labor really is inflationary. There can be no classic wage/price spiral without the wages part. And we can, indeed, break inflation on the backs of workers. He have done so. It worked.
The inflation spikes of the late 1970s were a genuine problem and were used, in disaster capitalism style, to convince the people that a return to the stability of feudalism would be better for them.
. . .
To put it bluntly, the only way these fucks are going to give you anything is if they think it is declining in value. When the commodity of labor is going up and the value of money is going down there is pressure to turn money into labor to turn materials into things because THINGS are a better investment than MONEY.
And things should be a better investment than money. And it should be expected that the dollar value of your labor will increase, rather than the labor-buying value of a dollar increasing.
But we are a nation brain-washed into thinking that since (a) wages have never, will never and can never increase then (b) inflation hurts workers.
If (a) were true then (b) would also be true, but (a) is not true at all, despite our recent experiences in the Reagan-world economy.
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