I am paying attention... since real wages reflect wages including inflation.. hence the word 'real'. Nominal wages aren't keeping up, meaning there's a loss of purchasing power due to inflation.. which means real wages drop. But you're conveniently side-stepping the fact that we just had a massive economic downturn causing that drop in purchasing power... those are just the effects of an economic down-cycle. It never goes up and down at the same time. You just pick a small period in time. Relating the past 100 years of USD value to the 'bad' effects of inflation causing real wages dropping just isn't true. That would mean that the average or median people have severely lost out in well-being... So... USD losing 97% of 'value' over the past 100 years due to inflation... what has been the wage-growth over that period? Again questions.... but that's only because your answers are incorrect. It's a teaching method... you don't give the answer, but let the class find the answer... keeps the intellect up...
Not before massive global economic collapse. You clearly don't get how finance works, how a world without debt isn't possible... IOU's have been around ever since the apple episode in the hit series Adam & Eve... You're dreaming if you think an economy can exist without debt. The Chinese tried it by abolishing ownership... and all was owned by the collective. That worked like a charm.. not! And guess what... the people still had debts to the collective anyway... in the form of produce they had to give up. And how do you think innovation is done? All these ICO's are all basically a form of debt anyway. Company wants to built something and needs funding, that's done via people getting a share of it and donating money. Any type of funding is a type of debt... an IOU. Bonds, stock, deposits... A world without debt... don't make me laugh...
Summary? I do like a good doco from the past... but 1 hr.?.. I've got kids and shit, I haven't got any spare time....
JackRab(bit) cause you are forever slow huh? Real wages have stagnated for almost a half a century. The prior half they just kept up. Buy bitcoin. C ya.
Piss off, I've been respectful to everyone with good arguments. It doesn't matter if we disagree, but it seems to me that you can't have a normal discussion... You know, if you're just here for a troll.... just say so mate, "you're just slow"... we disagree that's it. You have not provided any decent argument, just one-liners... like Trump, it seems intellect has skipped you. Stagnating real wages are not an issue... that's normal in fact... that means wages have kept pace with inflation and purchasing power stays the same, which is a desirable state...
So... where am I exactly wrong? Because I didn't hear anything from Friedman in this video that points that out. It's a video from the late 70s, early 80s... Inflation was relatively high then 7%+... which is a problem and he correctly points out that rampant inflation is caused by severe increase in money supply and if that's not kept in check... it will have negative effects. Rampant is bad... low is not bad. He doesn't say he wants deflation... He also points out that debt holders with assets benefit from inflation... I said so too. And he points also out that the idea that inflation=tax is due to that fact that with inflation and rising wages where real wages stay the same... taxrate is affectively higher when the tax bracket isn't raised together with inflation. I don't know how it's done in the US, but in most Western countries the brackets move up. It's not like everyone is now in the highest bracket it it? Most western countries/central banks aim for an inflation rate of about 2%... I'm not saying that that's going to happen. I think it can go very quickly up beyond 2-4%... I don't know where it will stop... hopefully not far beyond that. I just don't think inflation is a bad thing when kept in check. It's preferred over deflation. Friedman actually asks that question as well in this video. When he says, what do most people think of inflation and do they think they have been hurt by it... they mostly say it's shit and I'm negatively impacted. But he then points to the fact that homeowners benefit... assets benefit. He says most people want to pay less for goods, but receive more for goods sold... and that that's unworkable since one persons buy is another ones sell... Friedman's idea as a Monetarist is that the economy is moved by monetary policy... He has said in the past that the Great Depression was caused by the FED decreasing the money supply... so a decline! That's exactly what I'm trying to say, that a decline in money supply is a negative for the economy. Increase is stimulus... but too much means inflation overshoots. Too less, economic downturn and perhaps depression, which likely causes deflation... bad thing.
In effect, the great depression was caused by the inability of the FED in increasing the money supply, instead letting it decrease, due to the workings of the gold standard and it being deflationary... same will be with an all BTC operated system... it's deflationary and therefore will cause massive economic downturn and depression. See... I line up with Friedman... and Keynes as well.. there's no black and white...
You understood partially how inflation is a tax. The brackets do move up, but never enough, and that is in all countries... He was always also very quick to point out that government issued debt is just a scam basically, because since government controls money supply, they are always getting more and paying effectively nothing.... But, as the saying goes(and he was the one who said it): "There is no free lunch". So who pays the bill? The people through decreasing purchasing power, which is only counterbalanced by progress in the private sector(the basics of life get cheaper as science and technology advances increasing quality and productivity of goods and services). And worse of all, the biggest problem is that money issuing by government is always uncontrolled(which is what motivated this lecture of his and motivated the book which he considers his most important work, "A monetary history of the United States"(we'll get to the book again in a minute), so it is always destabilizing the economy. He makes it clear that inflation is a disease and since the ONLY SOURCE OF INFLATION is money printing, that should be stopped. The only reason why this illusion that government issued money has to be printed to prevent recession is because it is like a drug. The moment it is printed, it gives a false feeling that everything is good. The rise in prices and consumption, even though moderate initially, make people invest in response to that rise, but since the rise is based on more money offer and not real demand for goods and services, eventually the expected demand doesn't show up and businesses start to fail. At that point, if things were left to adjust themselves, as he points out in the video, it would be a tough time. He says that there is no way around this, you have to go through a bad period in order for everything to stabilize and that will mean losses and unemployment. But, as with drug addicts, after a rough period of abstinence, we would finally be free from the drug. The problem is that, as with all addicts, what happens is that another dose of the drug is given and the false feeling that "things got better" comes back, reenforcing the idea that the drug is needed. He says that if the will to do that AND GO THROUGH WITH IT is not found, things would be in an endless cycle of huge up and down swings(which turned out to be true, 2008 being the best example of it). This is what Thatcher was trying to do and to this day there are idiots who say that she caused unemployment and recession, when in reality, that was the side effect of the correct "treatment" she was willing to do. He says that the FED's inability to print money caused the 1929-1933 crisis, but this is one of the most discussed things by him: even though that is true, the situation the led to the crisis in 1929 was caused by the FED. Essentially, if there was no FED, there would still be swings, but lighter. This is completely contrary to "common knowledge" today, which says that before the FED, things were less stable. This is where the book I mentioned is so important. He revised 93 years of monetary history, about 47 of which through balances and documents from the FED and he basically shows how these times were less stable and not more after it's creation.(As a side note, this is one of the books that got him the noble prize). In it, he mentions what I mentioned in the very beginning if this thread: "That there were at least two periods in the history of the US where money supply was not enough to track goods and services. That resulted in deflation as a mere equilibrium response and these were periods of very high GROWTH in the economy." But one thing I give you is this: It was indeed the 70's 80's and that means that there were no cryptos back then.. So his options were very limited... He suggested things like "fixing the money supply by law", which could only be curbed by congress, which we know doesn't work, given the always growing "debt ceiling" approved by congress(and the debt ceiling was also one of his ideas to control this). So he was stuck, because he essentially needed people to understand these things in order to effectively "go through the treatment and cure the disease". That's why I posted in the beginning if the thread too the video where he mentions cryptos many years later. And the beauty of cryptos is essentially this: it makes in the own self interest of people to act in a way that finally we can get rid of government issued money and given the already mentioned problems of government having this power, this will finally lead us in this direction, with no need for people to understand all this.