Rising Prices and Falling Values—Inflation and Social Decay
International Man: Whether it’s at the grocery store, the mall, restaurants, or airports—anywhere you turn—people are finding inferior goods and services at higher prices.
Living standards have taken a big step backward recently and are trending even worse.
What is really going on?
Doug Casey: There’s an inclination on the part of people to blame the producers of products—the butcher, the baker, and the gasoline maker—but that’s actually very silly, insofar as these people create real wealth.
They’re fighting the effects of government inflation, which doesn’t create anything but fiat currency and fiat credit, which is what actually takes the prices higher. In fact, inflation of the currency, which is to say an increase in the amount of purchasing media above the increase in real wealth. It’s what inflation is all about; it’s the State subtly stealing capital and wealth from individuals.
The big problem with the depreciation of the dollar is that producers are blamed as being the problem. They’re the solution to the problem in that they create real wealth. The real enemy here is the State and its central bank, the Fed.
International Man: How does inflation erode ethical standards, leading people to cut corners, lie, cheat, or even steal as they try to maintain their living standards?
Doug Casey: The prime directive of life is to survive, and entities, whether they be governments, corporations, or individuals. They will basically do whatever they have to do to survive.
Unfortunately, inflation is all about theft, subtle and hard to diagnose as it is, but theft breeds more theft.
Leaders of any organization, whether it be governments or corporations, set the moral tone. The average person may not understand much about economics, which is the study of how men produce and consume in order to survive, but they have an intuitive, even if not a technical, understanding of it.
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.