In Progressives Urge Biden to Push Harder on ‘Greedflation’, the Washington Post reports that President Biden’s campaign advisers are urging him to peddle “greedflation,” the ridiculous moniker meant to blame big business for inflation. Biden and many Democrats have been using this grossly unjust smear on and off for a while. Now they want Biden to make it central to his campaign.
Biden is just the latest in a long line of politicians who blame private enterprise for the disasters their own inflationary policies caused. (Janet Yellen also blamed consumers. But the main focus is on business, probably America’s most persecuted minority today.)
Inflation, properly understood, is strictly a monetary phenomenon—an artificial, unwarranted expansion of the money supply, which acts as a tax, not on actual dollars, but on the purchasing power of the dollar. The resulting general rise in prices (as opposed to the isolated price spikes caused by supply chain disruptions, tariffs, and the like) is actually the manifestation of the falling value of the dollar. And everyone—business big and small, consumers, workers, and even state governments, everyone—is stuck dealing with it the best they can. There can only be one cause. The government. In the U.S. the government nationalized money over 100 years ago. So how can Biden and the misnamed “Progressives” blame business? Simple. He and they are desperate liars.
But as I said, Biden’s not the first blame-shifting scoundrel. In the 1970s, the last inflation disaster, three presidents blamed private enterprise; Nixon (wage/price controls), Ford (his WIN initiative), and Carter (Council on Wage and Price Stability). All engaged in dishonest victim-blaming. All were morally despicable. And so is Biden’s latest campaign scheme. Every American should be morally outraged. No one should be duped; I will not be. The current inflation is a result of Biden’s spending/monetary policies layered on top of Trump’s spending/monetary policies. And that’s it.
Related Reading:
Joe Biden’s Despicable ,Unjust Blame Game
Economics in One Lesson—Henry Hazlitt
Did the New York Times Just Vindicate Reaganomics?
Blaming the Victims: The Government’s Theory of Inflation by Robert Higgs
Inflation occurs, by definition, when the economy’s aggregate volume of money expenditure grows faster than its aggregate real output. The excessive growth of money expenditures can have, again by definition, only two sources: either the velocity of monetary circulation grows excessively or the money stock itself grows excessively (or both). Our current inflation is attributable almost entirely to excessive growth of the money stock.
Because the excessive growth of the money stock and the inflation it causes do not happen simultaneously, some people always fail to perceive the relationship. Increases in the money stock take some time before their effect on the volume of expenditure becomes significant. But once the actual lag is recognized, the relationship is seen to be very close.
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