Writing shit like this is not gulag territory any more. Carrying this much water this willingly demands worse consequences.
Your puny little brains do not comprehend the arcane laws of economics but I, a credentialed neutral expert dispensing indisputable scientific facts, can assure you that bad things are the best scenario and that trying to improve society somewhat will inevitably end up making everything worse.
Before I read it, I think it’s going to do a fallacious reverse-causation argument saying that lower prices will cause an economic depression/recession. Or, they’ll say that higher wages need the higher prices.
Ironically, falling prices can both signal a recession and trigger one.
There it is.
I love how economists can say this and also say that capitalism is the best system possible in the same breath
they’re just priests
From the section titled “What might actually work”:
Colyar does think government policy could reduce prices in two major areas: housing and health care. The government is heavily involved in health care and could pursue policies that reduce costs. And government policy on zoning, land use and related issues could spur the construction of more housing, so that greater supply would help cut into soaring costs.
ABUNDANCE
“could help spur”
just fucking build it directly god damn
Huh that’s funny, because the rich never worry about deflation of wages…
What a coincidence, policies making life more affordable for the rich is somehow good, but for the have-nots? Now it’s bad.
Finally economists have come around on this. It has been clear from the beginning, prices must not be lowered, price must be abolished.
It’s not wrong that deflation is a much more dangerous situation than inflation. China and Japan have been going through a deflationary spiral, and it’s been dragging their economies down. Hence why the governments in China and Japan have been desperately trying to boost consumption to get into the inflation zone.
The problem with the US and Western neoliberal economies is that the wages are not rising faster than the inflation, as the wealth has been disproportionately concentrated at the top 1%, and this places a lot of financial burden on the working class.
This leads to another fundamental problem: if wages are being raised, how do you stop the wage-price spiral, where the rising wages also lead to an inflationary spiral?
The failure of the Fordist-Keynesian economists to stop the wage-price spiral in the 1970s directly led to the rise of neoliberalism under Thatcherism in the UK, and Reaganism in the US: if rising wages lead to uncontrolled inflation, then the only way (according to the neoliberals) to stop inflation is to crush the trade union movements and stop their wages from being raised.
Stalin’s USSR (1929-1955) had the only economic model in practice that I know of that succeeded in solving the wage-price spiral problem (wage increase without inflation), which gave support to the revolutionary contribution of Modern Monetary Theory (proposed 70 years later) in stopping inflation: the price anchor mechanism through jobs guarantee. Any other form of trying to control inflation, such as price controls, almost always end in failure.
So, it’s not wrong to say that deflation is worse than inflation. In fact, you really do not want to live in a deflationary economy. The question is what sort of economic policies you have to enact in order to solve these problems, and that requires an understanding of how fiscal policy and the monetary system interact within an economy, for which the neoclassical economists (whose theory justifies neoliberalism) have no answer for, so the way out is to crush the worker’s wages from rising and create an unemployment buffer to stop inflation.
The so-called “wage-price spiral” is bad economics not materialist analysis. It has been used by capitalists to justify not raising wages since Marx’s time. Marx literally wrote Wages, Prices, and Profits to refute it and he further elaborates on these ideas in Capital Vol 2. Modern economists carry water for the capitalists in every argument they make. They literally invented neo-classical economics to refute Marx for being CORRECT. If the tea-leaf readers and bone throwers of the capitalist class are telling you its bad, it means its bad for capitalists NOT workers. Surprised to see anyone on here regurgitate capitalist propaganda let alone someone who has so much knowledge of theory.
