Friday, October 14, 2022

Inflation

One of the tragedies of the Weimar Republic's hyper-inflation is that the decision-makers made a flawed diagnoses and never abandoned it.

They decided that the reason people could not afford groceries was because there was not enough money in circulation. Their solution was to inject ever-greater amounts of currency into the economy with predictable results.

Inflation, after all, is a mismatch of demand for goods-and-services (either due to a shortage of goods or the relaxing of some constraint that choked demand) and the amount nominal purchasing power.

Goods and services are "real". Nominal purchasing power is a convenient fiction agreed upon to smooth commerce. Reality trumps fiction.

If you read When Money Dies, the book that chronicles the Weimar hyper-inflation, you will experience that Horror Movie "thrill" where you shout "Don't open the door! Don't open the door!!" because you know what is going to happen next.

The feckless red-shirts always open the door.

The inflation went from bad-to-worse-to-horiffic, from painful-to-crippling-to-fatal.

History rhymes

Whelp, here we are again!

The powers that be are spewing largess on their favorites to the tune of Billions, even Trillions of dollars because the favorites cannot afford rent and groceries and lottery tickets and smokes and condoms and malt-liquor and Starbucks coffee.

That is injecting vast amounts of currency into an economy that is already experiencing accelerating inflation.

Then, unknown millions of immigrants are swarming across the border, jacking up demand for goods-and-services.

Everybody is going to college and planning majors where they require a PhD which removes them from the productive work-force for one-quarter of their work-life and makes them unsuitable for a vast spectrum of very necessary types of work. Again, choking the production of goods-and-services.

Draconian rules about being vaxxed a brazillion times, social distancing in the work-place and other productivity killers are pushing productive workers out of the workforce, further choking production and reducing the availability of goods-and-services.

Good-and-services are being "sunk" into green energy construction. Those physical resources cannot be recycled and repurposed. Every 2mW wind-turbine sinks 26,000,000 pounds of concrete and a commensurate amount of steel reinforcement into the ground to hold it up. That concrete will be abandoned-in-place when the wind-turbine is decommissioned in 25 years. 

Crude, back-of-envelop calculations suggest that amount of concrete is enough to build 170, Soviet-style, 800 sq-ft apartments.

Why won't they stop the insanity?

Author Marvin Harris contends that the reasons given for conflict between the Catholics-and-Protestants in Ireland, the Sunni-and-Shia in the middle-East are false.

The real reason is much, much closer to the reasons for conflict between gangs in cities. It is about "turf" or access-to-resources.

The reasons given are like the perforations between the squares of toilet paper. They happen to be a convenient, pre-defined failure line. In the case of society, those fault-lines happen to be a convenient line to define those who will enjoy resources when times get tough at the expense of those who will be denied.

It is more important, in the eyes of the Powers-that-be, to guarantee the continued existence of those fault-lines and assure "their side" of future consideration than it is to avoid the looming disaster. 

"Yes, I know the citizens of Vermont are cold...but take comfort in the fact that the cowboys in Wyoming are colder."

10 comments:

  1. "...lottery tickets and smokes and condoms and malt-liquor and Starbucks..."
    Judging by the hordes of fatherless feral youts, I don't think condoms are on their shopping lists....
    Differ

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  2. Posting on various internet sites to rent a big ranch home here on the homestead I stand amazed at the number of single women replying to my posts . They all know it's a country place with wood heat and yet they all have the same sad story . I can do anything a man can do including work firewood . Some of them have 4 or 5 kids but they don't need no man , heh . So sad but very telling on the state of our society .

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  3. the devaluation of our currency is deliberate, as a side product of the graft being worked by our senators, executive bureaucrats, and representatives

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  4. It is true that TPTB don't care about whether we peons have enough money to buy goods (unlike what is postulated here for the Weimar). What they care about is whether they have enough money to buy what they want. And since they also happen to hold the key to the printing press, they will continue to manufacture as much money as they need to cover their expenditures, regardless of the prices. That impact on us is irrelevant, if not desired. After all, the more of us they bankrupt, the easier it is for them to buy up our property (be it housing, stocks, farmland) at firesale prices. There's a reason that Great Reset will take to the "you own nothing" and if "you aren't happy, we'll starve you" stage.

    Weimar may have been ignorance and stubborness. What is happening now is deliberate.

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  5. I long ago came to the conclusion that “The system” was a blinkered, selfish, short-sighted, Ponzi scheme of musical chairs. ‘They’ don’t care what the consequences are (they know they’re going to be bad) as long as “they get theirs” before the inevitable collapse.

    Whilst they do get to enjoy the fruits of their corruption ‘now’, I suspect (despite all the historical data) they really do believe that when the excreta hits the rotary impeller they’ll be able to keep on enjoying it (instead of losing it all, or more likely, dangling from street furniture).

    It’s almost as if simple consequences, let alone second and third order effects are … simply beyond them.

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  6. 26,000,000 pounds of concrete per windmill, that’s about 6500 cubic yards. Seems like a LOT. ( or did I miss something?)

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    Replies
    1. It is a lot. It is below ground to keep it from blowing over

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  7. All this begs the obvious question. If they were DELIBERATELY trying to destroy the economy and the US what would the be doing differently.....

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  8. That's over 7000 (thousand) yards of crete per turbine. Or, more like what's needed to build about 110 foundations for 1500SF homes.
    A turbine will NEVER create more energy than what was used to build it.

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