by jorb » Wed Jun 01, 2011 7:07 pm pyrale wrote:As far as I know it's not really the arbitrary good price that's interesting but rather it's evolution.
The point being that you cannot maintain measurement identity over time. The bread you measure today is not the bread you measured yesterday. Bread is an entirely different commodity today than it was in 1950, 1970 or, indeed, yesterday. Furthermore there is in the real world no such thing as "bread, plain and simple". All concrete instances of bread carry with them several differentiating qualities which serve to make them incomparable. Pumpkin bread is not the same as croissants. Since the government bureaucrats cannot help but be confronted by this conundrum as a very real problem, they are constantly changing the makeup of the CPI goods basket, leaving it at best a poor guesstimate as to what kind of inflation we are actually experiencing. Only incidentally does it actually measure price increases due to inflation. What it primarily attempts to measure is price increases/decreases, which can of course be due to a whole number of things, such as more efficient patterns of production, a failed harvest, increased consumer demand or the exhaustion of some resource node, and not merely increases in the money supply. It is no wonder that said bureaucrats love to include consumer electronics in their goods basket, since prices on those tend to drop due to innovation, thus masking the real inflation.
The expansion of the money supply as a percentage of the total money supply could however be measured with relative ease and accuracy. It also has the distinct advantage of not confusing inflation with price fluctuation. Unfortunately that would make the effects of "quantitative easing" -- namely the defrauding of the general public -- much too obvious.
Or we could have sound money and avoid the problem more or less entirely.
karlson2010 wrote:As for the US of A...I really don't know what to think about anymore. It looks fucked up by my opinion - the major capital is making the small people serfs. I have the sinking suspicion that we're headed towards feudal regime in nowadays.
Indeed we are. Our wise overlords in the government have arranged it so that select cliques of their friends and allies in the international banking communities get to maintain private monopolies on sectors of the financial system by government force of arms. It has nothing to do with capitalism, and everything to do with the eclectic blend of corporatism that the welfare state naturally comes to engender. It is a system wherein political privilege has come to entirely replace personal merit, much like communism or, indeed, feudalism.
