Replies

The combination of consumer cost inflation, commodity inflation, and decreasing consumer real wealth is more due to other factors than gold mining, I think.

You misunderstand my question. If we returned to a gold backed dollar, do you think we could find enough new gold each year to expand the money supply enough to prevent deflation?

The current systemic and deeply rooted inflation and decreasing "middle class prosperity" can adequately be explained by the Austrian economic model in my opinion.

I'm almost afraid to ask, what "decreasing middle class prosperity"? And how can the Austrian economic model explain?

I will do my best to explain important concepts of a non-PC sort. Please bear with my weaknesses. The "decreasing middle class prosperity" statement rests on what is meant by "middle class".

Perhaps we can agree that the "middle class" are those persons not of "lower class", i.e. those who have as productive assets their own intellectual or manual labor, nor those persons of the "upper class" whose assets are largely various income producing properties?

"Middle Class" then can not include those (whatever their income) without income producing property since they then must be "lower class". In the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries this was well understood. The middle class individual owned a business, whether a farm or a shoe repair shop, a productive mine, a cloth making business, or other some such. They were independent from dependence on wages and "the boss".

This group is smaller every day.

The Austrian School is a complete economic theoretical system in the same sense as is Adam Smith's. Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments" and "Wealth of Nations" is an economic theory, as is Marx's "Das Capital".

An important Austrian concept is that manipulation of interest rates causes misallocation of labor and resources and so decreases real wealth creation. Money and effort are invested in relatively low performing wealth producing investments during periods of managed low interest rates and produce rising commodity prices since these projects consume real resources at a greater rate than than the actual non-financial economy can support. Interest rates held artificially high cause many potential wealth producing investments to be foregone. Wealth creation therefore operates in a less than optimum manner.

One remembers Econ 101 where "Savings=Investment" is seen as a tautology, and the marginal propensity to save equals the marginal propensity to invest. This results in a market price for capital. Artificially reduced cost of capital, that is, interest rates held lower than market cost, makes investors see opportunities where value only appears to exist because of these lower than market interest rates. Mis-investment ensues.

Same thing happens with government spending, transfer payments, and such like because the money when used can only distort market prices. Market prices are necessary to set savings, investment, and consumption at the maximum wealth creation rate.