Subject: Federal Reserve/IMF
Yes, I know this is the province of the “right wing crazies”. The principle lecture series on it on YouTube ends with an endorsement of the John Birch Society.
Please hear me out, though. I have studied this topic carefully, and come to the conclusion that it literally doesn’t matter who we elect, in the long run, as long as unelected people have the power to devalue our currency through inflation.
You don’t often see it stated this way, but inflation is WEALTH TRANSFER, and it is my contention, which I can and will argue in the piece, that our purchasing power as a nation should be many times what it actually is.
For most people, inflation is something you see out of your intellectual peripheral vision. You know it’s there, but if it’s in the “normal” range of 2-4% or so, you don’t pay attention. Most of us graduate school with this vague notion that growth in production leads to higher prices, and that’s just how it works. Sometimes the Fed has to pull money out, sometimes put it in, to keep things growing steadily. This is the received wisdom, that the Fed is sort of like the regulating rods in a nuclear reactor, keeping things from getting too hot or too cold.
This isn’t right. Prices should be DROPPING, with constant wages. Let us posit that there is, for simplicities sake, $10 trillion in “dollars”, which is to say money held in banks and in paper and coin. 3% of that is $300 billion created out of thin air every year. Somebody gets that. That is now buying power the rest of us don’t have.
The trick is to keep it low enough that nobody asks too many questions.
This is the most important issue facing us. Nothing else is close. All the problems of wealth and poverty can be solved, if we just grasp this one fact. And if we don’t, it doesn’t matter in the slightest, in the long run, who gets elected in November.
I would appreciate a shot at writing a piece on this.