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Comment by ok123456

2 days ago

take me back

[flagged]

  • You're really reducing a whole economic situation to a currency issue ?

    • It's not just a currency issue; inflation is by definition a reduction in the purchasing power of a fixed wage, and the issue we're facing is that the purchasing power of people's wages is less. If their wages were denominated in a unit of account that wasn't continuously losing value, they wouldn't be continuously losing purchasing power.

      The reason you may not know it's an issue is because inflation in our current system isn't just a loss of purchasing power, it's a transfer of purchasing power to those who first receive/spend the newly created money: the banking/financial system. So of course the system invested a lot of money, time and effort in convincing you that it's a good thing to continuously donate a fraction of your purchasing power to the finance industry every year.

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    • The US had 0-1% inflation a year until the federal reserve. I blame the FED and currency, yes. Look up the "what happened in 1970" charts, and its we got off the gold standard.

  • It's a confluence of various factors. Explosive population growth, for example. The modern economy (of which fiat currency plays a pivotal role) relies on that of course, as the lending system is a bet on future growth. If that fails the whole thing can enter a state of catastrophic failure. But population growth has more precedence. Fiat currency, bureaucratization, etc. were adopted as reactions to increasingly explosive populations and unchecked rationalism developing the absolutely ridiculous modern state system.

    If you want demons to point a finger at, you're going to have to look further back in time than the 20th century. Then and now we're just doing a frantic tap dance to keep what we inherited from catching on fire.

    • Huh, what? Population increased a lot in the 19th century, and many countries did not have fiat currencies back then; and the price level most went down slowly as the population grew.

      (Modern day 2%-ish stable inflation is mostly fine for the economy, even if it technically erodes the value of money in the long term. The classic pre-WW1 gold standard was also fine-ish. The Frankenstein gold standard-ish they until the 1970s was bad. And so was the rampant inflation that followed for a while.)

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  • No, fiat currency has allowed our money supply to track closer to our GDP, preventing currency shortages and price manipulation by foreign adversaries, giving us the most stable economy the world has ever experienced over the last 50 years. Yes, it can be abused (and some Asian countries have taken this to dangerous extremes), but it’s better than all the alternatives so far.

  • The good standard didn't even last half a century before collapsing.

    Gold is way too inelastic to work as a basis for currency in an industrial economy.