Somehow magically the USG manages to report inflation significantly under 10% annualized, when all the reports that reach me from people actually on the ground indicate it's clearly above 20% annualized and might be as high as 50% this year. This has been going on for about five years if not ten by nowi. Well... how in the heck ?!
I mean obviously, on the meta level, teh empire be lieing, just like every other empire before it. Same story today as always : it's too hard to accept that "well that's that, we suck now" and much too difficult to meet the "legitimate" demands of the populace with a resounding "shut up and work more" and so therefore... lieing about it is seems the only way out. Tomes could be written on the laughable immaturity of the body politic today as two and no doubt five thousand years ago. We're advanced, supposedly ? We might be, in actual sciences, such as math and physics, and their applications, such as computer software and hardware.ii But in the pretend-sciences, in the pseudo-sciences, in the so called "humanities" we fail so hard we might get thrown off the planet. No music worth the name has been produced in a century, you should see what passes for poetry these days and generally speaking people are just as clueless & uncouth today as always. They may be "better" dressed, in the sense they've replaced natural fibers with synthetic and bearable colors with garish, they may be more "in touch" in the sense of less, they may be "making a difference" in the sense of not really but as far as their understanding of the world goes they closely match the crowds around Henry being promised a chicken every week and the mobile vulgus clamoring for further allocations form the public granaries.
Obviously. What made me curious was not exactly the why and wherefore as much as the how. And so I eventually broke down and read through the intricacies of nonsense, that complex craft of crazy that's regulation in a dieing empire. Here's it summarized for your convenience.
I. The official US inflation does not include food and energy costs. That's right. Indifferent of the fact that inflation has been decried in all times and in all places by those on fixed incomes as the dearnessiii of food and coal. Just like that, inflation has been completely taken out of inflation. By this measure no country in the world, including today's Venezuela or the Weimar Germany had any inflation. None at all!
II. The official US inflation allows substitution. Did the price of ribeye go up 500% ? Well not only does this not matter because of I above, but moreover if ground meat is now available at a 15% reduction in price the inflation will officially have gone down. This is because, the theory goes, customers can just move to the cheaper alternative.
I'll give you some empty space to collect yourselves off the floor.
So, yes, I'm not making this up : the empire doth not think inflation exists at all because you could always move on to a cheaper alternative. I suppose those in the audience that do not know what nechezol means are entitled to find out for themselves.
III. Substitution is allowed to dampen inflation. Have the prices for handhelds gone up 20% ? Awww, but meanwhile, has their processing power gone up 50% ? Well then there you have it, since the product is now "better"iv inflation is actually -30%.
This is the holy trifecta that allows inflation well over 20% and perhaps as high as 50% this year to be represented as whatever single digit fiction one wishes. Indeed it could be brought to -20% if need be. And then this imaginary number is what imaginary experts a la Krugman use to create their imaginary arguments about how the imperial finances should be managed. In other words,
If a small number of entities are issuing new coins, this is more resistant to state attack that with a single issuer, but the government regularly attacks financial networks, with the financial collapse ensuing from the most recent attack still under way as I write this.
Government sponsored enterprises enter the business, in due course bad behavior is made mandatory, and the evil financial network is bigger than the honest financial network, with the result that even though everyone knows what is happening, people continue to use the paper issued by the evil financial network, because of network effects - the big, main issuers, are the issuers you use if you want to do business.
Then knowledgeable people complain that the evil financial network is heading for disaster, that the government sponsored enterprises are about to cause a “collapse of the total financial system”, as Wallison and Alan Greenspan complained in 2005, the government debates shrinking the evil government sponsored enterprises, as with “S. 190 [109th]: Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005″ but they find easy money too seductive, and S. 190 goes down in flames before a horde of political activists chanting that easy money is sound, and opposing it is racist, nazi, ignorant, and generally hateful, the recent S. 190 debate on limiting portfolios (bond issue supporting dud mortgages) by government sponsored enterprises being a perfect reprise of the debates on limiting the issue of new assignats in the 1790s.
The big and easy government attacks on money target a single central money issuer, as with the first of the modern political attacks, the French Assignat of 1792, but in the late nineteenth century political attacks on financial networks began, as for example the Federal reserve act of 1913, the goal always being to wind up the network into a single too big to fail entity, and they have been getting progressively bigger, more serious, and more disastrous, as with the most recent one. Each attack is hugely successful, and after the cataclysm that the attack causes the attackers are hailed as saviors of the poor, the oppressed, and the nation generally, and the blame for the the bad consequences is dumped elsewhere, usually on Jews, greedy bankers, speculators, etc, because such attacks are difficult for ordinary people to understand. I have trouble understanding your proposal - ordinary users will be easily bamboozled by a government sponsored security update. Further, when the crisis hits, to disagree with the line, to doubt that the regulators are right, and the problem is the evil speculators, becomes political suicide, as it did in America in 2007, sometimes physical suicide, as in Weimar Germany.
My chief complaint with the US version of "progress" is exactly that : it consists of taking a county where a hundred people live in brick and concrete housing, dressed in cotton and wool and enjoying actual meat and actual potatoes on their table and replacing it with a county where two hundred people live in vinyl-siding "housing", dressed in nylon and polyester and enjoying ground hooves and chemical paste on their table. This is not progress, even if a county with 160 low information voters is more likely to toe the line and "not cause problems".
This is not progress, but apparently it is exactly what the USG is after, even down to its peculiar redefinition of what inflation means. As such being a part of the evil empire is today and remains as always a crime against humanity.
———- It's in no case something that can be represented as an invention of Obama. The man just continued what was there. You know, just like the PATRIOT or Guantanamo Bay etc. [↩]
- While the progress in physics is constant and undeniable, the advancement of math may be purely theoretical. An argument could be brought and indeed has been brought that there's not been any advance at all in all software for as long as two decades or maybe even three decades.
I only point this out to settle a dispute that's about two decade old by now. I had some mates in highschool you see, who mistakenly believed their science is just as good as mine. Heh. [↩]
- This term seems all but forgotten in American English. It's the antonym of cheapness. [↩]
- Which is to say just as good as it used to be as a relative situation, which is exactly what money is supposed to buy, but let's not get into this discussion again. [↩]
