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Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 18, 2024

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.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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They even cite the inflation number for food, which was considerably higher than average.

Everyone has to buy food, energy, and shelter.

Everything else is optional. If those three things have a higher-than-average inflation rate, and they do (the asset price bubble doesn't help with respect to shelter, of course), the politically-active citizens are much more likely to notice and complain, have a common nucleation point around which to complain, and most importantly can reclaim the moral high ground of "making things more expensive than they need to be is anti-poor" and in so doing split the lower class against the upper (which is one place where the normal strategy of "high and low against the middle" fails).

The trick about artificially making things more expensive is that it doesn't come without cost, the people doing the artificial increases have already leveraged all of their socioeconomic credit, can't pay the interest on the exercise of that power, and their social credit has been downgraded as a consequence.

Wait, you think we have an asset bubble for housing? Where?

Who is engineering the high inflation for specifically food/energy/shelter to drive class warfare and how are they doing that?

I do not follow your last paragraph because I don’t know who these people are or what you mean about what they’re doing and what it costs.