As I have argued many times in the past, the corruption of money itself and its purposeful devaluation is by far the most important problem facing not just investors and savers, but virtually every single citizen on the face of the planet. Taxation, especially the extremely predatory and aggressive kind that most governments enforce today, might indeed be theft, but inflation is even worse. This is because taxation might be robbery, but at least it is daylight robbery, and everyone can clearly see what is being taken from them as it is being taken. Inflation on the other hand, is surreptitious. It is a silent, hidden, insidious sort of theft that most people don’t even realize they are victims of, even as they are being robbed.
However, more and more people are catching on. They see their paychecks run out before the end of end of the month, even though they are not indulging in extra luxuries or reckless spending. They notice that the same grocery basket that they had been buying for years has become less and less affordable. This is why governments try their very best to gaslight their own citizens and ask them to reject the evidence of their own eyes. They “massage” official CPI data, they use increasingly “creative” formulas and cherry picking calculations in order to artificially push the published data down and then they champion the egregiouslybiased results as evidence of “winning the fight” against inflation. In turn, this allows them to pressure central banks to cut interest rates and it gives them the justification they need to keep spending taxpayer money. Clearly, these policies bring inflation even higher, so then they have to start this “loop” all over again.
This vicious cycle is not, and was never going to be, sustainable. As the old saying goes, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” Eventually, you arrive at the point we stand today, where political leaders and institutional figures can publish and celebrate distorted inflation data and deny reality all they want, but the people are simply no longer buying it. Eventually, governments realize that twisting and manipulating numbers is no longer enough. They also have to twist and manipulate words and language itself.
By redefining inflation away from its real cause, which is and has always been the artificial expansion of the money supply, political and financial elites have blurred the lines between who is responsible and who suffersand why. This semantic sleight of hand not only shields the architects of fiat monetary systems from blame, but it also teaches society to accept a deteriorating quality of life, to surrender to dependency, and to seedecay as inevitable.
Michael Matulef’s analysis, recently published by the Mises Institute, does more than diagnose this economic distortion and its implications: it maps how inflation spreads like a cancer through our lives, how it warpseveryday choices and how it tricks ordinary people into believing that it is inevitable, that it is simply the way things are and that the blame rests with everyone else, including themselves, but not with the people and the institutions that actually caused it. Most pertinently, Matulef’s piece offers a stern and extremely timely and necessary reminder that inflation is not merely a policy failure, it is first and foremost a moral one.
Claudio Grass, Hünenberg See, Switzerland. www.claudiograss.ch
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Therefore please feel free to share and you can subscribe for my articles by clicking here
