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Blaming Capitalists and Workers for Inflation
- fithisux 3y agoAren't bankers capitalists?
- AnCapAndrew 3y agoNope, they are in bed with the government in a highly regulated industry. Capitalism is the absence of government control and the free exchange of good and services.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- piva00 3y agoCapitalism does not imply absence of government control... That's one ideological extreme branch of capitalism, don't conflate them.
- flagrant_taco 3y agoI think the confusion here is capitalism vs free markets. They're pretty darn similar at first glance, but the absence of government control is only a feature of free markets [1] [1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042215/what-difference-between-capitalist-system-and-free-market-system.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042215/what-differe...
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoA market free of government control is an abstract concept. All actual markets, even the free ones, experience a variety of government controls. Some more, some less, and of different kinds depending on the political, economic and social situation they are embedded in.
- wahnfrieden 3y agomarkets existed before government via free association
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agovery much subject to debate. depends a lot on what "markets" means and what "government" means.
- phpisthebest 3y agoGovernment is very easy to define, a system of social control for which a group or entity is given the exclusive authority to use violence to enforce that control Thus there are no voluntary governments, as if everyone agree to something no force is required, and all government actions are enforced via the threat of violence
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoThis is simplistic and fails to cover all the arrangements that one might one to call a government. It also shows all the hallmarks of an over-reliance on the internet-provided definition of a government (which of course pats itself on the back of seeing what all those silly academics couldn't see). I mean, for goodness sake, just a quick browse of Graeber & Wengrow will reveal many forms of societies' arrangements for collective decision making that violate your description (in part because your description is about enforcement, which some societies eschew, and fails to deal with collection decision making at all).
- phpisthebest 3y ago>>This is simplistic and fails to cover all the arrangements that one might one to call a government. This would then imply that all collective social arrangements of people must be called "government" and that any definition of "government" that does not include every possible social arrangement of people is flawed I reject this over broad assertion, when we attempt to broaden the definition of words to that degree they lose all value in meaningful conversation as the word now means anything. These seems to be common in modern times something that should be resisted
- uoaei 3y agoFree markets, in the original Smithian definition, require extensive government influence to keep the market free for new participants to enter and make opportunities for themselves. This means quashing bad actors including monopolists and other actors who seek to distort the market in drastic ways.
- flagrant_taco 3y agoFree markets don't require any intervention, we choose to modify the model and have a free-ish market because we ultimately don't trust those invoked long term. That isn't the conceptual design though, ideally a free market handles monopolies on its own when customers simply walk away from the bad actor.
- uoaei 3y agoMaybe you're just choosing not to read my comment and steamroll what I said. I can't tell. Adam Smith, the guy who defined the term "free market", defined it as I described, not as you have attempted to retcon.
- flagrant_taco 3y agoI'm not trying to steamroll you, I just disagree. I can't find a source defining free markets as requiring government intervention, I'd be really curious to e one of you have it. Adam Smith didn't think government intervention was necessary, as best I recall. He described what he called the invisible hand, but that is the natural market forces of self-interested parties not government control. I copy/paste a quote from Investopedia right now for some reason, but Smith described his opinion of the tiles of government and it specifically didn't include controlling the free market https://www.investopedia.com/updates/adam-smith-wealth-of-nations/ https://www.investopedia.com/updates/adam-smith-wealth-of-na...
- wahnfrieden 3y agocapitalism relies on government to establish and enforce private property ownership/enclosure
- sumuyuda 3y agoState capitalism exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
- the_lego 3y agoNot central bankers - they are an arm of the government, charged with managing currency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank
- shove 3y ago[flagged]
- shove 3y agoIt’s perhaps difficult to find the flaw in this argument until you note that society isn’t 50/50 capitalists and workers. Pull on that thread a bit and combine it with the fact that neither the government nor bankers (whether central or Main Street) sit magically outside society and it starts to become pretty obvious what’s going on here. This is garden variety propaganda masquerading as rational think-piece.
- c4mpute 3y agoYour argument is flawed. Society isn't necessarily 50/50 capitalists/workers. But corporate media and thus public discourse is.
- cced 3y ago_Corporate_ media is 50% workers? What are You going on about?..
- c4mpute 3y agoCorporate media talks 50% about their corporate interests and 50% about "the workers" in an unconvincing way for the appearance of balance. So this is perfect for the kind of artificial antagonism that is supposed to be created by the central banks and govt as the article suggests.
- glimshe 3y agoThat is an extraordinary claim. Most of what I see in the media is about politics, crime or the life of artists.
- shove 3y agoThe map is not the territory bro
- spacecadet 3y agoapplaud emoji - yes, enough of this single dimensional thinking on hacker news.
- isykt 3y ago> So what's next? Any prospect of workers ever making up that lost 8% will run head into the coming recession, when both wages and workers are slashed. In fact, the latest jobs numbers say even workers' drip-down has ground to a halt as full-time jobs evaporate and gig work picks up the slack. Not sure what JOLTS report he’s reading, but it must not be the latest one. Job layoffs are lower than pre-pandemic levels. Hires and quits were both up in May. [0] Furthermore, it’s unclear that the shift to the gig economy is led by the employers. Baby Boomers (the largest generation the US has ever had) are retiring en mass. The pandemic killed mostly older people. Immigration ground to a halt during the pandemic. Who exactly is going to work these jobs? Robots? [0] https://twitter.com/eliselgould/status/1676964296402817025?s=20 https://twitter.com/eliselgould/status/1676964296402817025?s...
- phpisthebest 3y ago>>Baby Boomers (the largest generation the US has ever had) are retiring en mass. I dont know the demographics data, but I know a number of boomers personally that are "semi-retired" meaning they are "retired" but they still work some in gig-ecomony jobs, some even work in smaller roles (almost gig style )(i.e project based) for either their old employers or in the same field they were in as Full time employees.
- isykt 3y agoI think this explains a large portion of the gig work that the author of the blog post pointed to, instead of the author’s theory that employers are doing it intentionally. This means that wages will eventually rise further as those boomers take on less work and eventually enter full retirement, or stop working due to illness or death.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cat_theorist 3y ago[flagged]
- aga98mtl 3y agoYou can pick any macroeconomy textbook and you'll see it written plainly that raising quickly the monetary supply leads to inflation. The central banks did this to avert an incredibly painful recession during COVID. It worked! It was the right move. However the price to pay is all this inflation once thing went back to normal.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoBut, the argument that there is "too much money chasing too few goods" holds no water when at the same time, real wages have, until recently, been decreasing. Whatever has happened here is not due to the explanation in the standard economic texts.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoOr, put differently: there may have been too much money "in the system", but it wasn't in the hands of working people.
- zztop44 3y agoAnd you’ll also find that in the past 20 years the link between money supply and inflation hasn’t followed the orthodox model and the macroeconomics textbooks have come under question by mainstream economists. That said, it’s clear there was incredible asset inflation in the decades leading up to 2022, so it could be that an outsize proportion of the increased money supply simply ended up in the hands of rich people and homeowners.
- croes 3y agoThis doesn't mean that that's the only reason for inflation. Look at the rising profits and explain to me how that isn't because of higher prices which account to inflation.
- 3y ago
- jeezfrk 3y agoPity the poor poor wealthy investor as money is NOT offered to them as investment returns and savings interest! It was ... gasp ... printed and faked by scheming capitalists of the wrong (Keynesian) kind! Then handed to people who gave in to NOT WORKING during the pandemic. Under the GOP administrations of course deficits don't matter because subsidies and defense are too important.
- littlestymaar 3y ago“Central bankers are evil” is the upper class version of flat-earther. Looks like in this day and age, every sociological niche must grow its own stupid conspiracy theory…
- shapefrog 3y ago"I am the worlds greatest interest rate trader, look how cheap my mortgage is" was their battle cry in the days prior to it being "all Central bankers fault".
- janmarsal 3y agoWhat does inflation even mean these days? I thought it means when you increase the money supply the purchasing power of one dollar goes down. Then when you go to wikipedia it says inflation means "general price level of goods and services in an economy". I thought that's just a possible and likely outcome of inflation, not the definition. Then they talk about stuff like "food inflation" and at first you think well that's good the price of food is going down as the amount of food in the markets increases, but then they say it actually means that the price of food is going up. What? In "money inflation" the value of money goes down but in "food inflation" the value of food goes up. This doesn't make any sense. Why can't we just use the old definition for inflation? These days it seems like inflation simply means price increase and has nothing to do with monetary policy. So what is the "old inflation" called these days? Like when you increase the money supply the value of one dollar goes down. What's that called these days now that "new inflation" simply means general price increase and even supply chain disruptions can cause "inflation" somehow.
- zer0tonin 3y agoHave you considered that it was not "the old definition", but just that you were wrong about it?
- tmn 3y agoIt was the old definition. It made more sense when the money supply was defined as a the pool of circulating money. Now that the supply is debt based and abstract, it became non pragmatic to keep referencing it.
- throw0101a 3y ago> Now that the supply is debt based and abstract, it became non pragmatic to keep referencing it. Supply has been debt-based (or rather, credit-based) for decades, if not at least a century. It was wrong for decades, and yet folks like Milton Friedman insisted on using this definition: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetarism
- croes 3y agoPoor companies, forced to rise the prices and get higher profits by the evil puppet master central banks.
- draw_down 3y ago[dead]
- readthenotes1 3y agoIt is funny for the author to deny greedflation simply by explaining how it works.