Hate Inflation? Blame Corporations
Hate Inflation? Blame Corporations
They're responsible for 100% of the price hikes we're enduring
“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.” — Laurence J. Peter
Inflation, economists will tell you, is caused by all sorts of factors.
There are cost-push factors:
rising commodity prices
rising wages
natural disasters
And there are demand-pull factors:
consumer confidence
high employment
expanding credit
Yada, yada, yada.
The economists are all wrong.
Or rather, they’re trying to distract you from the truth.
Today I’ll show you there’s only one (1) singular source of all price inflation:
Corporations.
The problem with economists
“Economists know almost nothing about anything.” — Thomas Piketty
There is a major problem with modern economics.
In the desire for newer, fancier, shinier theories, economists — like millions of other Americans — are detaching themselves from reality.
Just listen to economist Steve Keen, who believes neoclassical economics is “inconsistent, unscientific, and empirically unsupported”:
“If you look at mainstream economics there are three things you will not find in a mainstream economic model — banks, debt, and money. How anybody can think they can analyze capital while leaving out banks, debt, and money is a bit to me like an ornithologist trying to work out how a bird flies whilst ignoring that the bird has wings.”
Keen makes a great point.
Economics is completely detached from science.
Maybe we should use biomimicry to build the ideal economy instead.
Prices don’t have to rise
It’s important to remember that inflation isn’t natural.
Price inflation just doesn’t occur in the real biological world:
Monkeys don’t worry that the price of nuts and bananas will go up.
Worms don’t worry their children won’t be able to afford a dirt duplex.
Badgers aren’t outbidding each other for burrow rentals.
Bees aren’t indebting themselves for life to wasp bankers.
For thousands of years on the American Plains, the “price” of buffalo meat never changed: Water, sunlight, and mineral-rich soil grew grasses, bison ate the grasses, and First Nations tribes ate the bison.
For thousands of years on common land, a family could build a house for the cost of gathered wood, collected stone, and a few weeks of hard labor.
A loaf of bread may cost five American dollars today and fifty American dollars thirty years from now, but the natural cost will always be a bit of water, some yeast, and a few cups of grain.
It took a Boomer less than <5,000 work hours to pay off their first homes.
It now takes more than 40,000+ hours to pay off a mortgage.
(Hint: The time theft difference is how billionaires are created.)
Nature doesn’t believe in inflation — prices always remain steady.
Nature, if we can put it crassly and reduce our glorious ecosystem into mere economic terms, practices Sustainable-State Economics.
Greedy homo sapiens, however, prefer the cancerous, extractive, deadly Grow-Forever Model.
Maybe it’s time to fire all the economists and let ecologists set economic policy instead.
What actually causes price inflation
Most people sleepwalk through life without ever thinking about economics.
If you asked the average person on the street what causes inflation, they would say either:
A.) I don’t know.
B.) Government.
But the answer is so excruciatingly simple.
Do governments raise prices?
No.
Do buyers raise prices?
No.
So what causes prices to rise?
And the answer is…
Sellers raise prices.
That’s it.
Governments and buyers don’t raise prices.
Sellers do.
If no seller on earth ever raised their prices for any reason whatsoever — including reasons like money printing or even greedy/desperate buyers trying to outbid each other and pay more — inflation would simply cease to exist.
Inflation isn’t real.
It’s just pure greed.
So the real question is:
Who are the sellers?
And the answer is: They are overwhelmingly corporations — multinational monopolies with huge unfair advantages that set the price standards everyone else is forced to follow.
Who profits from inflation?
“The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist” ―Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Cicero and the ancient Romans always asked an important question:
Qui bono?
Who profits?
Who profits from price inflation?
Certainly not average workers and consumers, who have to pay consistently higher costs with extremely limited money that’s continually worth less.
Certainly not the government, which is comprised of relatively low-paid sociopaths who will lose their jobs if inflation rises too sharply. (That’s why they straight-up lie to us about how fast prices are actually going up, constantly manipulating CPI numbers to suit the political narrative.)
The people who actually profit from inflation are the same people who are causing it:
Billionaires and their favorite weapon: Corporations.
How billionaires make money via inflation
Because billionaires hold 99.9% of their wealth in assets, inflation is irrelevant to them personally. If prices rise 10%, their assets just go up in price an extra 10%.
Because billionaires no longer trigger income/dividends/estate taxes, rising asset prices mean they can borrow more money against their assets to fund their lavish lifestyles… then wait for inflation to devalue that debt before paying it back.
Plus, by blaming the big bad government for “not controlling inflation,” corporations suddenly gain pricing power: the ability to quietly raise prices, lower quality, and shrink portion size. All of these forms of inflation are silently stealing a metastasizing amount of time wealth from the productive, contributive, working class.
The worst effect of inflation, however, is what it does to the assetless. For the ultra-poor, and for those with the discipline to save up hard cash for a rainy day, down payment, or future business, inflation crushes their wealth and gives billionaires a greater financial advantage. So far this year, inflation is “officially” running at around 7%, but is more likely double that figure in reality. What this means is that, while billionaires get 7+% richer, the money of the assetless loses 7+% of its value. Their only options are to buy into wildly overpriced/overinflated assets and risk losing everything in an eventual crash. Over the next five years, they’ll either lose half their savings due to inflation, or half their savings due to a crash.
I honestly can’t believe that tens of millions of assetless Americans haven’t burned Wall Street to the ground.
Inflating the working class’s sense of wealth-power
Inflation has a powerfully manipulative psychological effect on the masses as well: It makes them think they’re growing richer, while they’re actually growing significantly poorer.
Take, for instance, the British National Health Service (NHS). Last year, they got a 1% pay raise.
But real inflation was 10+%, so they actually got a 9% pay cut.
If you didn’t get a 20% pay raise for the past three years in a row, you are materially worse off than you were in 2019.
Homeowners especially fall prey to the notion that they’re in better shape because their house is magically “worth” hundreds of thousands of dollars more than it did five years ago. But it’s all just paper. Unless they move to Siberia, they’ll never be able to lock in these theft/gains and still keep an owned roof over their head.
In 2022, food, heating, transportation, and especially housing prices will rise massively, and while many people will receive the tiniest of pay raises and see their house “value” and paper net worth go up, they will be significantly poorer in real relative wealth.
Inflation is a kind of collective mesmerism, duping the working class into the vague feeling that everything is going in the right direction, even as we head for total catastrophe.
Corporations cause inflation
Economists are half-right when they say that inflation is caused by all sorts of factors. But at the end of the day, there’s a single underlying common criminal causing all the price inflation we’ve been enduring for the past century:
Corporations raising prices.
Corporations monopolizing, colluding, and price-fixing.
Corporations purposefully constricting supply.
Corporations increasing demand and out-bidding consumers for houses, stocks, art, and anything else they value.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking all this inflation is caused by governments printing excess currency. Who controls the big bad government? Corporations.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking rising wages for the contributor class are what’s causing inflation. That’s scapegoating the only innocent people in the country. Corporations are only paying more right now because they’ve caused massive cost spikes and simply can’t get enough staff to fill their positions. Nearly every corporation in America is currently at all-time highs for stock price, profits, stock buybacks, and CEO pay. They could cut all these things, still give workers a pay rise, and not raise prices. But they don’t.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking money printing is what’s causing inflation right now. It’s not even what’s causing so much excess credit in the economy right now. That’s entirely the fault of private banks—financial corporations creating trillions in credit out of thin air. This leads to the Magic Money Multiplier Effect, and it’s the reason the world’s awash in $300 trillion in debt right now.
And don’t fool yourself into thinking that corporations “have” to raise their prices… corporate profits are currently at an all-time high. If corporations cared about humans — and they definitely do not — they would take a huge pay cut and profit cut to get us through these trying times. Instead, because their legal fiduciary responsibility is to amass private profits at the public’s expenses, they’re raising prices and blaming everybody but themselves.
Just yesterday, the vice-chairman of a $10 trillion investment company went on Bloomberg and said “central banks will have to live with higher inflation because the cost to the economy will be too great if they raise interest rates too much.”
Humanspeak: Contributive workers will have to live with higher prices and devalued currency so hedge fund billionaires can keep their stock prices up. #BreakUpBlackRock
To recap
The corporations who control the government and own the US ReserveTM print trillions of dollars and give themselves the right to create credit out of thin air.
Corporations and their corporate suppliers understand there’s more money in the system, so they raise prices and slash value, siphoning trillions in dollar-time-wealth from the contributor class.
While the poor and working-class struggle more each year to survive under ever-rising prices and ever-devaluing currency, billionaires sit on their corporate assets and borrow against their ever-growing stockpile to live in luxury while the poor suffer and the working class descend into lifelong generational serfdom.
In conclusion
“Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.” — John Kenneth Galbraith
Are you ready for the extremely bad news, friends?
Without a revolution, world war, or major economic depression, prices will go up for the rest of our lives.
Meaning: life will get harder for the average person until the day our grandchildren die.
This reality is already breaking millions of people per day, and will only get worse in the years to come.
So who will be the scapegoat?
In the same way that unthinking people blame “immigrants” for all their economic woes, don’t let anyone dupe you into thinking that price inflation is caused by “the big bad government.”
In the twenty-first century, price inflation can only be blamed on the people who profit from it and have engineered a society where prices rise continually:
Billionaire corporations.
What can we do?
We must purchase the world we wish to inhabit.
If you’re serious about doing your part to stop price inflation, then you have to stop enriching the corporations that cause price inflation in the first place.
You have to stop buying from multinational predator corporations.
You have to stop voting for corporate-captured political parties.
You have to spend less and spend locally.
And you have to wake up the others.
It might already be far too late.