Originally Posted by brodle
If my wage was denominated in gold or 'X' number of loaves of bread then I would get the same every year. As I am paid in a depreciating fiat currency I need my wage to increase (or decrease if deflation be the case) to continue to receive the same wage in gold or 'X' number of loaves of bread. If this is not the case I am taking a wage cut every year.
To turn the argument around (to where I perceive your interests to lay) would be to say that a company should not be allowed to increase the price of its product unless it can show an improvement in the quality or utility of the product.
Just because something is 'just the way it is' does not make it ethically (a foreign term for many large businesses today) right.
Originally Posted by Capn Bloggs
To keep pace with inflation, one needs CPI+the tax take.
Bravo brodle & Bloggs - you get it. Inflation is a
HIDDEN TAX, levied in an arbitrary and indiscriminate way. It is what governments have always done when the wage slaves refuse to pay more tax. This is the dirty little secret, that until recently had been understood by a small group in the know, at the expense of everyone else.
Two quotes demonstrate this better than I can:
Originally Posted by John Maynard Keynes
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.
Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Chapter VI, pg.235-236
Originally Posted by Henry C Wallich, 1978
Wallich explained that inflation "is technically an economic problem. I mean the breakdown of our standards of measuring economic values, as a consequence of inflation." The strong are smart enough to understand that inflation "introduces an element of deceit into our economic dealings." Contracts are no longer made to "be kept in terms of constant values," but one party understands this better than the other.
Chairman Greenspan: A Fiat Mind for a Fiat Age: Henry C Wallice Federal Reserve Board member, 1970's