The basics of economics are well understood, and well articulated by people like Thomas Sowell, in his “Basic Economics”.
The crux of my own contribution is to point out that the demand for money is fixed. There is never any intrinsic value in money, qua money. Yes, gold can be converted to fine jewelry, but it is not then acting as money.
Mutability in supply is, then, necessarily a corruption of the generalized wealth building that would otherwise happen in conditions of free markets.
Given a fixed supply of money, the purchasing power per unit of labor would logically rise. This follows as an element of common sense from the obvious fact that productivity has been surging vastly faster than population for the last centuray and more, yet what you can buy–although it has increased vastly in quality–is really not that much more. What has in fact increased VASTLY is our collective debt. This is the fault in the US, primarily, of the Federal Reserve, and in the developing world that of the World Bank and IMF.
As should be obvious as well, this corruption is necessarily in the favor of some, at the expense of others; and, to the point here, to the benefit of a few, at the expense of most of us.
Monetarists like Milton Friedman looked at what happened, and thought about how to improve it. They saw monetary contraction causing recessions, and concluded therefrom that a modest amount of inflation, by extension, was the corrective. Friedman’s arguments in favor of capitalism and free markets were sound, but in my view he missed this very fundamental point, for the simple reason that he was an economic historian. This perhaps made him a realist, but in my view there is also a moral principle involved here, that we still have kings and economically non-productive avenues to vast accumulations of wealth.
This is unfair. It is literally and with no exaggeration theft, and on a scale beyond even my own comprehension.
The economic system I am talking about (here, if you have not see it) has never happened anywhere, since the beginning of recorded history, to the extent of my knowledge.
Neither have nuclear bombs. It is time we begin in earnest the new thinking that needed to attend our new capabilities that Einstein talked about.
The demonic are among us, and collectively probably do have the ability to crash the global economy. Their numbers are not great: merely their money and following power are.
Our task is to reach those capable of moral judgement and encourage them to change their mind–and I have in mind here those who think they are “improving” the world by eliminating political liberty; and to fight like hell those who are psychopaths. Where George Soros lies on that continuum is unclear, but that he has in mind the enslavement of the many for the benefit of the few is clear enough.
Most Communists take as their task the REPLACEMENT of a Capitalist elite with an elite of their choosing. The fundamental power relationship, however, devolves from one of what can amount to de facto slavery–although in historical reality it has always been liberting–to one of actual and overt slavery of the worst sort. No slave plantation in the American South ever erected psychological torture camps to “free” the souls of their charges.
I will add that they have always lived among us. Globally, genuine Goodness is probably increasing rapidly, with the “outbreaks” of peace we see. I doubt that fewer wars have been fought around the world ever, in human history.
There is certainly room for cautious hope, but only if people keep waking up to the danger they are in, and the fundamentally corrupt nature of our current system.