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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4454 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 19, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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When I Google this I get a bunch of one-sentence explanations about "inflation" and "supply chain problems" but those just sound like things that most people think a smart person would say and/or that they heard from the TV box.

Sure, but the other explanations you have don't really seem much better. Can M2 really cause unemployment to skyrocket? Or do you just know that both these things are 'bad' and therefore must be connected?

Inflation and supply chain issues don't just fall out of the sky, they're the result of government policy.

They don't fall out of the sky, they spring from the earth. Inflation and supply chain issues were here in the world long before our current government policy, before our government, before your nation, before nations themselves. It is simply the natural order of things that pieces of paper don't have any value and that it's very difficult to coordinate supply chains across the entire planet. To the extent that we've made things otherwise, it's the result of (among other things) government policy.

Second of all, even in the narrow sense you mean it, it's not government policy. Japan, for example, has avoided high inflation despite continuing to pursue the kind of easy money policy you rail against. Despite this real wages have been eroded - caused by high commodity prices, which are not in the gift of the Japanese government to control.

My economics-illiterate impression is that technocrat morons freaked out and started pulling levers during covid, ruining the economy in the process by causing mass unemployment and killing SMBs and pumping massive amounts of free money into an economy where money was already free, which caused serious inflation nothing to see here citizen, inflation is low, CPI is normal, everything is fine, don't trust your lying eyes or wallet and now another band of technocrats are raising interests rates to control the mess their comrades caused in the first place, compounding everyone's pain.

So which one do you want? Easy money or tight money? Or do you just want to believe what you want to believe?

Easy money or tight money? Or do you just want to believe what you want to believe?

No idea, man. Whichever one doesn't make less able to afford stuff with the same paycheck, I guess. You say it's the result.of government policy -- which ones?

I don't think it's the result of government policy.

Oops, yeah, I misread. You say government policy is the tool we've used to mitigate economic issues that spring from the earth.

I'm not really sure how to respond to you tbh. You seems to be criticizing something in my post, but I've already admitted in the first sentence that I don't claim to understand much about economics.

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