politics

I would LOVE to unpack this with you right here and counter your sentiments.

Great. So do you understand why a moderate level of inflation is a good thing for quality of life? “line go up” in a broad economic sense.

The main issue I have with this is that its a self fulfilling prophecy, and that's something all economists acknowledge. The prevailing theory is that rising prices alters consumer behavior, ie making a new purchase out of fear of further price increases. Workers ask for raises to cope with rising prices. My argument is that this bad due to the circular nature of this logic. As a working everyperson, you ask for a raise to mitigate inflation, so that you can again afford goods/services, which then increases the demand, which in turns results in higher prices again. Employers decide to pass this cost on too which further inflates prices.

The issue is the lack of monitored expectations due to investor demands both in speculative and results driven investments. Take a company's debt basis or attractiveness to investors, they want the "line go up" to get a return on investments but that has to come from somewhere. In what we're seeing today we have record earnings and by all indicators record revenue growth but investors want their return, and the executive leadership in our current organizational models means they answer neither to customers nor employees but only "line go up", and that's short term at best. Cue lack of monitored expectations. On the sense of policymakers looking at inflation being too bad, their control mechanism for reducing inflation puts the hardship primarily on the working class. Ie reduce demand by firing people and putting them into poverty. The need for healthcare exists, and the facade of "but EMTALA makes healthcare accessible" does nothing to address the financial ruin a person sees by getting laid off, losing their job and coverage, all because policymakers saw that inflation was too high and it gets taken out on workers instead of having mechanisms to deal with corporate profits, which is widely acknowledged to be responsible for 40% of inflation overall, yet the control mechanism is widespread impact on those least able to absorb it.

My opposing viewpoint to the economist perspective of inflation being necessary is this concept of forcibly creating winners and losers the way that we do. People who attempt to save money lose because their savings is devalued, so we're dependent on a set of tax rules that allow us to rathole money up in 401k's/IRA's on the hope that investments outperform inflation, but anything in savings just devalues over time. Let's say you save money for major auto repairs, but in one year the repair costs jump up 20%, how fair is that? That means we have to continually adjust the financial model for vehicle ownership, and if you plug those numbers in you find that people can't afford cars where 5 years ago on median incomes they could. Meanwhile credit worthy individuals who borrow heavily benefit from debt that gets "inflated away" provided they are lucky enough to negotiate the income.

I don't know if you've noticed, but 2024 is not off to a great start, due to the interest rate adjustments, getting a job right now is hell, so the worker leverage is virtually gone. Employers are increasingly taking the "GTFO if you don't like it" approach and are even doing soft layoffs with RTO policies.

Count more than fucking beans, and also economists emotionally justify what they want to see, and the data can be interpreted many ways. I think it's a bullshit profession that causes way more harm by justifying policy that benefits the wealthy while fucking the rest of the country.

And do you understand how profit motives spur investment which generates improvements which leads to better quality of life? “Line go up” for individual companies.

Explain that to the hundreds of thousand of people finding their job redundant thanks to AI investments. I don't see how getting fired benefits people when the market isn't creating replacement opportunities for them. What's happened is that the leverage people use to enjoy in their profession just got removed, and I would posit that this mindset has created the second gilded age that we're in with a declining quality of life. Look at housing, healthcare, and education costs before telling anyone with a straight face that the above mindset lifts up quality of life for the average person. I would say that for wealthy investors and the billionaire class, it sure benefits them.

And this is a little more advanced, but also a little easier to see in the real world: do you understand why every planned economy has failed to raise quality of life as well as capitalist economies?

Look at Scandinavia and tell me the US healthcare approach is better. Look at Canada and tell me the US higher education system is better. We're already seeing competing economies that use socialism alongside capitalism to vastly improve quality of life metrics far moreso than the US. Capitalism is fine, when its regulated and heavily so. It's amazing to me that people forgot the Sherman Anti Trust Act, and why such laws got passed in the concept of "what's good for the public trust". Economics works against the public trust by being amoral in nature. Things like stock buybacks need to be illegal again, and socialism shouldn't be an ugly word. Heavily regulating conflicts of interest (see Oxley Sarbanes), anti-trust (see Sherman Antitrust), and working against the concept of "winner take all" is how we avoid despots and tyrants who got lucky enough to be born rich and sociopathic.

If you go back to the planned economy the US had during wartime, I would argue that a planned economy sows the seeds for the massive gains experienced by the bull markets thereafter (transitioning from WW2 to the 50's). Unplanned free market economies are what has been associated with the guilded age and "winner take all" concepts that dominate our worst years of depressions in history.