[mommya]

Well - I’m dressing in older clothes, kid rides the bus to school, less happy meals than than in the past, cheaper dinners lately cuz that $20 isn’t going as far as it could. Inflation due to the old supply/demand is one thing , but when more dollars are printed and circulated in order to benefit or bailout some persons or entities, I - who play by the rules - get screwed by inflation through devaluation. I always heard that one way for an enemy to undermine our financial stability would be for them to flood our system with (fake) currency. What’s the difference if some outsider does this or the Fed. does this - same result.

[mnehring]

Then you aren't a victim, you are in control of your circumstances. Sure, you have to change what you do, but change will happen. When you start trying to have the government regulate change, you are in real trouble. If you think changing monetary policy will stop this change, be it inflation, devaluation, whatever, you are in trouble. Up until 1971, we allowed foreign banks the option of cashing currency in on gold. Even with just foreign banks working off the gold standard as a value basis for our dollar, it had inflated the cost so much and the demand increased so much, Nixon was forced to either take a loan against international gold supplies from foreign banks or take us completely off the gold standard (he chose the latter.) Thinking changing the monetary policy back to the gold standard (or any other standard) is the solution is a myth, it only continues the process of the government continuing to manipulate currency to try to stop change. (with gold it is far more volatile because it is a fixed asset currency that is much more prone to the whims of supply and demand.)

The real solution isn't changing monetary policy, it is for the government to stop the micromanagement in the first place. Yes, you will have inflation, you will also at times have deflation.

I think what a lot of people don't understand with Paul's proposal of moving to Austrian Economic Theory is that inflation, deflation, recessions, depressions are not eliminated, on the contrary, Austrian Economic Theory states very plainly that these changes naturally occur often because of the simple nature of supply and demand. (Keizer, Willem (1997). Austrian Economics in Debate.) It is a direct part of the Mises-Hayek business cycle theory.

It is not the solution people think it is, it is just the government continuing to play with the currency.

But to get back to the point, even this debate is moving us right back to the problem- is the government there to really fix our problems? Every generation believes exactly like you, that things are getting worse. Yet looking back, every generation has improved upon the last.