OPINION: Jeff Deist - Inflation: State-Sponsored Terrorism

  • Printer friendly view
 Sunday, October 9, 2022 - 05:25
OPINION: Jeff Deist - Inflation: State-Sponsored Terrorism

Remember the quaint old days of 2019? We were told the US economy was in great shape. Inflation was low, jobs were plentiful, GDP was growing. And frankly, if covid had not come along, there is a pretty good chance Donald Trump would have been reelected.

At an event in 2019, my friend and economist Dr. Bob Murphy said something very interesting about the political schism in this country. He said: If you think America is divided now, what would things look like if the economy was terrible, if we had another crash like 2008?

Well, we might not have to imagine such a scenario much longer.

If you think Americans are divided today, and at each other’s throats—metaphorically, but more and more literally—imagine if they were cold and hungry!

Imagine if we had to live through something like Weimer Germany, Argentina in the 1980s, Zimbabwe in the 2000s, or Venezuela and Turkey today? What would our political and social divisions look like then?

Ladies and gentlemen, we live under the tyranny of inflationism. It terrorizes us, either softly or loudly. I suspect it will get a lot louder soon.

As the late Bill Peterson explained, “Inflationism, in today’s terms, is deficit-spending, deliberate credit expansion on a national scale, a public policy fallacy of monumental proportions, of creating too much money that chases too few goods. It rests on the ‘money illusion,’ a widespread confusion between in­come as a flow of money and income as a flow of goods and services—a confusion between ‘money’ and wealth.”

Inflationism is both a fiscal and monetary regime, but its consequences go far beyond economics. It has profound social, moral, and even civilizational effects. And understanding how it terrorizes us is the task today.

Read more at Mises Wire or watch on Odysee. 

 

Deist, a tax attorney and former chief of staff to former Congressman Ron Paul, is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.