"Inflation Is Stealth Austerity"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"Austerity - bad. Inflation - good. Oh wait - they're the same thing: both are a reduction in purchasing power. The only difference is a reduction via austerity is upfront while inflation is a stealth reduction, obfuscated by "official" distortions and Federal Reserve mumbo-jumbo.
Consider $1,200 in wages, unemployment, stimulus, Social Security payment, etc. If this payment gets cut by 10% - $120 - as a result of austerity, pay cut, reduction in hours worked, etc., recipients scream bloody murder. But if inflation reduces the purchasing power of the $1,200 by 10%, nobody does anything but grumble that "prices keep rising while my income stays the same." This is the classic boiled frog syndrome: inflation is like the heat being turned up so gradually that the poor frog doesn't realize he's about to expire.
Inflation is stealthy because the loss of purchasing power is difficult to monitor. Your $1,200 only buys what $1,080 bought in the recent past; 10% inflation reduced your income exactly the same as if austerity had subtracted the $120 upfront.
Governments and central banks love inflation because the theft goes unnoticed. The public tolerates inflation because it's easy to passively accept this erosion in their standard of living and difficult to generate the political heat that an outright cut would spark.
Though it's being openly engineered by the Federal Reserve, inflation appears to be a force nobody controls - unlike austerity which is so clearly a political decision. If Inflation robbed 10% of everyone's income overnight, people might be roused from their passivity to protest. But since the theft occurs slowly - what's 1% a month? - and unevenly across a spectrum of goods and services, this theft doesn't rouse the same political storm as upfront austerity.
Inflation is a form of sacrifice that few recognize as sacrifice. It seems like everyone's income is eroded equally, but this isn't true: the wealthy closest to the Fed's money spigots are earning multiples of inflation from asset inflation, stock buybacks, etc. Inflation is a pinprick to the wealthy and a stilletto in the kidneys of the bottom 95%.
To the political Aristocracy, inflation is wonderful because they don't need to ask anyone to sacrifice 10% of their income as they do with austerity; they just steal the 10% a dribble at a time and throw up their hands as if inflation is some mystery force completely beyond their control.
Ironically, austerity - an honest, upfront political decision and sacrifice - is decried, while the dishonest, stealth cut of inflation is passively accepted, even as the Federal Reserve has made a cloaked political decision to reduce the purchasing power of everyone's income except for the New Nobility (the top 0.1%) that the Fed slavishly serves.
Rather than decry austerity, which demands an open political discussion of trade-offs, we should decry inflation's stealthy reduction of purchasing power, a Fed policy that benefits the few at the expense of the many.
Here is the Chapwood Index of inflation, which carefully measures "apples to apples" costs of essential goods and services in each city:
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As inflation erodes purchasing power, workers' share of the economy has declined dramatically - a double-whammy of declining purchasing power and standard of living."
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Related:
"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 [also] 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."
- John Maynard Keynes
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