You can check historical pricing on commodities. The bottom has fallen out of natural gas and pork, with most commodities well below their 2007/2008 prices.
Posted on 10/25/2009 3:55:57 PM PDT by arthurus
Before we consider what the consequences of inflation are in specific cases, we should consider what its consequences are in general. Even prior to that, it seems desirable to ask why inflation has been constantly resorted to, why it has had an immemorial popular appeal, and why its siren music has tempted one nation after another down the path to economic disaster.
The most obvious and yet the oldest and most stubborn error on which the appeal of inflation rests is that of confusing “money” with wealth. “That wealth consists in money, or in gold and silver” wrote Adam Smith more than two centuries ago “is a popular notion which naturally arises from the double function of money, as the instrument of commerce, and as the measure of value.... To grow rich is to get money, and wealth and money, in short, are, in common language, considered as in every respect...
(Excerpt) Read more at jim.com ...
Don't forget everyone holding a fixed rate mortgage, with little in the way of savings, and a salary that is likely to be indexed to inflation. That's a lot of people.
All I can say is, if they really think they’ll be better off then they must not remember what it was like.
8 mos ago a can of ravioli was 50C
Today it was $1.65
Great Post ! Henry Hazlitt is perhaps the best plain spoken economist of all time, of course Friedman may have the edge.
If Hazzlit’s “Economics in One Lesson” were required course work to graduate high school - we’d have a different country.
I didn’t know it was available in it’s entirety on line. I strongly encourage anyone who hasn’t read it to do so; and promise they will automatically be smarter when finished !
I read the last chapter. (It’s from 1979) It saw Reagan coming. It did not see Obama.
hmmm, I need to do similar price checking with a can of cat food.
“I read the last chapter. (It’s from 1979) It saw Reagan coming. It did not see Obama.”
Hazlitt lived to be almost 100,( http://mises.org/about/3233 ) but the original work was done in 1946. His writing style reminds me of Levin, in fact I’d go so far as to say that “Economics in One Lesson” is to Economics what “Liberty and Tyranny” is to Politics.
Every American would do well to read both !!
A lot of things have gone way up in price.
You can check historical pricing on commodities. The bottom has fallen out of natural gas and pork, with most commodities well below their 2007/2008 prices.
So those who traded in their paid off cars (wealth) for a ‘cash for clunkers’ (notice how it’s given an ugly name), for a new car (new loan) actually bought into a loss of wealth.!
Thanks.
No problem...it shows what a great impact the oil prices had right before the economic bust.
For many years we have going through “rate of inflation”.
You get a raise at your job, prices go up to cover raises, or vice versa.
IMHO, the “real estate boom” was inflated prices. The same type of prices we are paying for everything. Gas at $3.00 a gallon instead of $.30 a gallon in the 1960’s.
The value of each item doesn’t go up, just the price. Who is the final winner each time prices go up? Not us!! The government, with taxes on everything, including higher income, revenue from sales tax, and property taxes as the values are increased yearly, whether the house is sold or not.
This is a sad merry-go-round we are on. We are forced to ride it, and at the same time PUSH it. Now, try and work in that position.
SamsClub = .86 for 15oz can.
Liberals love runaway inflation. It makes savings accounts worth ZERO! This makes everyone who worked hard and saved money poor. Liberals love that!
The liberal elite will never be poor. They vote themselves special privileges and raises so they will never be poor. Meanwhile everyone else is poor an dependent on the government.
Liberals also cannot believe that there can be “expansion” without inflation. They are almost universally zero-sum in their economic thinking and inflation and expansion are to them synonymous. They think that inflation, by “making exports cheaper and imports more expensive” they are sucking some more of the unchangeable stock of wealth out of the rest of the world which sets up guilt in the liberal mind which leads to all sorts of other irrational beliefs and acts.
My 4 kids were each required to read it once in middle school and again in high school. They are immune to liberal arguments now.
Officially inflation has been negative over the past year. The “basket of goods” used to measure the rate is changed periodically to purge those items that rise the fastest and add items that are falling out of the market and thus going down in price.
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