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| Friedman |
How is it possible that Connecticut Democrats running for office in 2022 so infrequently offer comments on the obvious and, more frequently, fail to connect glaringly obvious dots?
During his basement campaign for the presidency, President Joe
Biden, one eye cocked on pseudo-anarchists such as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and
her “Squad,” pledged to do away with fossil fuel. He abandoned a nearly completed pipeline and
sharply reduced the possibility of supply – as a surety of his pledge.
It worked. In no time at all, gas at the pump being in short
supply and demand rising after the U.S. and much of the world had shaken off
its COVID slumber, the price of gas rose -- from a low, during the supposedly intolerable
Trump regime, of $2.96 in May 2018 to its present level, a brain rattling $4.84
per gallon.
In concert with high energy prices, increased costs in the price
of goods and services -- owing largely to exorbitant spending -- rhetorical
buffoonery some ascribe to mental deterioration, and a pending recession,
Biden’s approval
rating has dropped to 38 percent, according to the most recent Ipsos/ABC
News poll.
At the same time more Americans are shelling out inflation
impacted reduced value bucks for necessary purchases, some dot-connectors in
the Democrat Party, biting their fingernails to the cuticles, are actively
beating the bushes for a Biden replacement.
In its most recent poll -- “Poll: Just 18% of Americans say Biden should run for reelection in 2024 —
a new low" -- Yahoo is reporting, “The survey of 1,672 U.S. adults, which was conducted
from July 8 to July 11, represents perhaps the starkest evidence to date of the
president’s deteriorating position with voters — including those in his own
party. Since late May, the number of Americans who say Biden should run for
reelection has fallen by 7 points; among Democrats, that number has fallen by 8
points.
“Meanwhile, when asked ‘who they would
rather see as the Democratic nominee for president in 2024,’ only about a
quarter (27%) of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents now say Biden.
Fewer say Vice President Kamala Harris (19%); most say either ‘someone else
(20%), they’re ‘not sure’ (30%) or that they ‘wouldn’t vote’ (4%).”
Neither Yahoo nor Ipsos/ABC pollsters
are especially fond of former President Donald Trump. Biden has airily dismissed
both polls. And, unsurprisingly, so has Governor Ned Lamont, who recently lit
up Connecticut’s skies with this star burst: Asked by a reporter to comment on a
new report that inflation had reached 9.1 percent, Lamont replied that the
alarming figure was “backward looking,” Lamont’s
prosaic way of saying – nothing to see here; go back to sleep.
“I think when you look at oil, gas,
commodities, wood,” said the eupeptic Governor, "we are bending the curve there.
So, in that sense, 9.1 [percent] is a backward looking number.”
Biden’s Republican opponent dismissed the
airy dismissal: “People are hurting in Connecticut and around the country. Real time wages after inflation are falling, costs are surging, and people are
being left behind. Inflation is a tax on the people of Connecticut, and it’s
the policies of @GovNedLamont and his good friend Joe Biden,” inclined these
days to pin rising inflation on proto-Stalinist Vladimir Putin, “who are to
blame.”
It might be a good idea at this point
for everyone to have a gander at what the late Milton Freidman said
inflation really is – too many dollars pumped out by big spender Biden, chasing
too few goods, a depression in consumables caused mostly by the unenlightened
economic policies of Biden.
Nutmeggers who live in what once was “tobacco
valley” may be interested in Freedman’s discussion of tobacco as a means of
exchange in colonial days.
“Anything can be used as money,” and
usually was. In colonial days, tobacco was used as money. It was the common
money of Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas. The legislature voted that it could
be used to pay taxes, buy food and clothing and housing.
“Now you know how money is; there’s a
tendency for more and more of it to grow, for more and more of it to be
produced. And that’s what happened with this tobacco. As more and more tobacco
was produced, there was more and more money. As always when there’s more money,
prices went up – inflation.
“Indeed, at the end of the process, prices
were forty times as high in terms of tobacco as they were at the beginning of
the process… Gresham’s law, one of the oldest laws in economics was well
illustrated. That law says that cheap money drives out dear money, and so it
was with tobacco.
“Anyone who had a debt to pay sought to
pay it in the worst quality of tobacco he had. He saved the good tobacco to
sell overseas for hard money. The result was that bad money drove out good
money. Finally, almost a century after they had started using money [as a means
of exchange] tobacco was stored in large barrels in warehouses, and they issued
warehouse certificates which people gave from one to another to pay for the
bills that they accumulated.
“These pieces of green printed paper [dollars]
are today’s counterpart of those tobacco certificates, except that they bear no
relation to any commodity… Before every
election, our representatives would like to make us think we’re getting a tax
break. And they’re able to do it, while at the same time raising our taxes,
because of a bit of magic they have in their kit bag. That magic is inflation.”
Bad, inflated money drives out good
money, and the more of it there is, the greater the reduction in its purchasing
power. Real commodities are up in price in large part because the value of the means
of exchange has plummeted, so much so that it has wiped out gains in salary
increases.
Like God, Gresham Law will not allow itself to be mocked by cheap
side-show politicians.
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