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Confusion plays a major role in politics, much of it intentional. The variety of confusion is more various and destructive in the modern period. Benjamin Disraeli is reputed to have said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, dammed lies and statistics.” Lying, as he understood it, has been much improved since the late 19th century.
By way of example, take the mass confusion surrounding
inflation. The tendency in modern politics is to confuse the general public by
conflating inflation and high prices. Though increases in the price of goods
and services and inflation – a product of government spending, borrowing and
currency devaluation – are related, they are not the same.
Inflation is caused when the federal government prints and
borrows money, thereby reducing the purchasing power of the dollar, therefore
making goods and services more expensive. The classic definition of inflation
is: too many dollars chasing too few goods. When the federal government over a
long period of time prints too many dollars or borrows too much money to pay
for improvident spending, the purchasing power of the dollar is commensurately
reduced, and it will take more dollars to purchase the same amount of gas that,
years earlier, was far less costly.
Making a sharp distinction between inflation and price
increases helps us to understand why President Joe Biden and most Democrats are
wary of talking publically about inflation. Just at we regard Typhoid Mary as
the precipitating cause of typhoid, so we may regard Democrat big spenders as
the precipitating cause of inflation.
The word “inflation” does not fall trippingly from the tongues
of any of the seven Democrat U.S. Congresspersons in the Connecticut’s U.S.
Congressional Delegation.
Why not?
The answer is disarmingly simple: inflation is a creature of
political flimflammery, and a price increase is a creature of a public
marketplace reacting reflexively to the flimflammery.
Inflation, the reduction of the purchasing power of the
dollar through the excessive borrowing and printing of currency by the federal
government to pay – or not to pay, as it pleases the government – outstanding
debt, is wholly and preeminently a political
choice.
Price increases, on the other hand, are the result of
economic choices sometimes forced upon businesses through excessive taxation,
regulation and free market disturbances.
Neo-progressive legislators – Bob Duff and Martin Looney in
Connecticut are two prime specimens – find it expedient during election periods
to condemn redundantly rich CEOs for acquiring excessive profits they then
stuff under their high priced Sferra Utopia Eiderdown Medium Pillows – Cost $4165.00.
Shouldn’t these CEO grifters be sent to a Gulag?
This is not the way the free world works. Profits across the
fruited plains are used by companies to cover the costs of production, to pay
workers’ wages and salaries, to produce new products in an expanding economy, to
contribute, sometimes lavishly, to state and national treasuries, and to shuttle
campaign offerings to precisely those politicians who are hobbling businesses.
Recently, Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff and Senate
President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, both Democrats, have enlisted the help of
Connecticut’s Democrat Attorney General William Tong in intimidating Connecticut
grocery businesses.
The duo “plans to seek expanded authority for the Attorney General
to investigate profiteering throughout the food supply chain, from distributors
to producers. (Currently, Tong’s authority to conduct such inquiries only
extends to retailers.) The expansion will be proposed as an amendment to Senate
Bill 3, which calls for several changes to consumer protection laws, Democratic
leaders said,” according to a recent piece in the Hartford Courant.
In a neo-progressive economy, only government will be
allowed to expand and earn excessive profits – i.e. surpluses.
Martin Looney, the Bernie Sanders of Connecticut politics,
tells us, “There seems to be some indication that the price of groceries has
stayed artificially high in the wake of [the pandemic] even though the crisis justification
for it has passed. So it’s another case of corporate opportunism to add to
profits at a time when it’s really not justified.”
A compassionate Tong is on board with the extension of his
power and authority, “Every single day, people in Connecticut, families are
getting squeezed,” Tong said. “Our job, collectively, is to push back on that
squeeze and to give Connecticut families just a little bit of breathing room.”
Reducing taxes on Connecticut families through spending reductions has never
been for Tong a useful means of giving Connecticut families breathing room.
Inflation marks the gap between the United States’ Gross
National Product (GDP) and the nation’s accumulative debt. When state and
national spending per year exceeds state and nation’s GDP, inflation, the
devaluation of the nation’s currency by a government that prints and borrows
money to fill the gap, increases. Despite continuing assurances from big
spenders that inflation has been tamed by ringmaster Biden, the annual
inflation rate in the United States prior to the possible reelection of Biden
is about 4.1%. The cumulative
inflation rate is about 18%.
Inflation can be painfully diminished only through tax
increases, the bane of most politicians who find themselves in the heat of an election
campaign, or spending cuts or both. Because it is a hidden tax, inflation –
always is a hideous, thief in the night.
Tong cannot control the retail prices and services. He can,
and should, advise his state and national governments to discharge their debts
by reducing spending and augmenting the political courage necessary in our too
confusing economy to permanently settle the imbalance between the state and
nation’s GDP and the state and nation’s debt.
Political problems such as inflation demand political
solutions. And price increases, like any market problem, should be settled by
self-correcting free and independent buying and selling arrangements. Freedom
and liberty allow more breathing room to citizens than does the incubus of high
taxes, imprudent spending and a busybody attorney general.
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