IS INFLATION INFLATED?

Who invented Inflation? The short answer is, the Government. But common sense should tell you that it was driven, like so many things in our world, by big business.

If we would look up the definition of Inflation, we would find a lot of nice sounding rhetoric pertaining to: goods and services; supply and demand; economic downturn; economic growth; purchasing power; debt relief; job growth; yah-da, yah-da, yah-da. And your economic experts and political spokesmen would make it all sound good, although complicated and not easy to be understood by mere humans.

Of course, I’m convinced that it is just a bunch of baloney that they have to use in order to justify their misuse and abuse of things. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a good reason for the exorbitant price increases on goods and services provided to consumers. I didn’t say that there has never been a reason – just never a good reason. There may be tens or perhaps hundreds of reasons but they are all rooted in the soil of GREED. That’s right, plain old money grubbing greed. And the driving force behind such greedy people is to feed their enormous egos and need to feel superior to almost everyone else. Yes, it is a power trip.

Now, of course my position would be hard to prove and part of the reason is because we would have to go way back in time, perhaps to where most people live off the land. We would have to go back to the time before we became so industrialized and commercialized. You can’t really start in the middle of a matter such as this and make sense of it any more than you can un-fired a gun after the bullet has left the barrel. For now, we would simply go round and round with one merchant point the finger at the other merchant and each one claiming that they are just trying to catch up. And in large part, that would be true.

So when I say that there is no good reason for inflation or inflated prices, I do understand that we cannot actually undo it now. I just want to try and put an end to the lie that we’ve been led to believe, that says it’s inevitable or that it just happen due to circumstances rather than by human design. If you don’t stop to think about it, most of us just believe that prices have to go up simply due to the passage of time. There is not one good reason for a loaf of bread or a pair of shoes or a piano or a chair or a car or a necklace or a pencil or a baseball bat or … to cost any more today than it did 50 years ago. Now before you go and start defending the business community with the lines that we’ve been fed over the years about how it costs more to make or produce these items now, remember what I am talking about. I have already acknowledged that once we started down this slippery slope then, of course it affects every other business connected down the line. But I’m talking about the real reason for price increases in the first place. For we know that it not only does not cost more to produce goods now, in most cases the cost is actually less, due to modern technology. We can even dig ditches today with much less manpower than was needed 50 years ago, though with much greater production due to our advanced technology.

I could go on and on with examples to support my position, but I hope you get the point. It’s all about being rich; and then being richer, and richer, and richer. And it didn’t help matters much when, a couple of decades ago, they started paying athletes and entertainers ungodly sums of money just to “play” and practice their trades. I am sure that this only drove the “greedy” to become even greedier. After all, they couldn’t let a singer or ball player be anywhere near their equals. Being a millionaire didn’t mean much anymore. Now they had to become a billionaire or, at least a multi-multi millionaire. Of course, caught in the middle of race was the middle class and average Joe, being squeezed right out of house and home.

And if that was not enough, all of this has virtually killed the dollar’s buying power. Believe it or not, this hurts everyone, including the ones at the top. I don’t know how all of this is going to play out or if it can be turned around or slowed down, but as the line in the movie goes “something’s gotta give”. Even with our highly publicized economic meltdown of recent months, the Wall Street-ers, the Insurance Executives, the Bankers and others still don’t seem to get it. They are still seemingly hell-bent on that road of callous greed and destruction. Of course, the politicians are in their pockets too. In fact, at this stage, they sort of feed off each other and neither seems capable of sensible or moral behavior. Just this week, a highly paid utility executive in California announced that he is leaving his job as the head of the department to take a position elsewhere. And, believe it or not, the city’s political leaders want to keep paying him his salary for at least the remainder of the year. Then there is also talk of keeping him on the payroll (as a consultant, they say) at his same ridiculously high salary. And this kind of thinking makes sense to your politicians today. That’s SCARY! Well, we could perhaps amuse ourselves for a moment, due to the fact that it is October, and say that it’s because halloween is fast approaching. But no, this is what happens all the time!Boo! Hoo!