Even more broadly, it ignores the real soft ceiling on available resources.
Like, we've got millions of Americans who insist on stuffing their faces with meat at every meal. And that meat has to come from somewhere, be farmed and packaged by someone, be delivered, be cooked, be served. There's a real use-value cost to all this shit. There's a use-value cost to cars. There's a use-value cost to semiconductors. There's a use-value cost to running water and real estate. There's a use-value to vaccinations and intubation wards and N95 masks.
We're a country that seriously believes you can just create a derivative of a derivative and finagle the price of things so as to never, ever run out of stuff. Now that we're no longer enjoy comically oversized surpluses and competing with the rest of the world on a more-equal footing for material wealth...
Even if the US never printed another dollar, we're running into a question of where stuff actually comes from. We could do Full Communism tomorrow, but it still won't do anything to keep the lights on under current consumption patterns. No economic system can squeeze extra toothpaste out of an empty tube.
Reminder that just chalking everything up to "inflation" deliberately ignores the agency of businesses and capitalists, conveniently.
Even more broadly, it ignores the real soft ceiling on available resources.
Like, we've got millions of Americans who insist on stuffing their faces with meat at every meal. And that meat has to come from somewhere, be farmed and packaged by someone, be delivered, be cooked, be served. There's a real use-value cost to all this shit. There's a use-value cost to cars. There's a use-value cost to semiconductors. There's a use-value cost to running water and real estate. There's a use-value to vaccinations and intubation wards and N95 masks.
We're a country that seriously believes you can just create a derivative of a derivative and finagle the price of things so as to never, ever run out of stuff. Now that we're no longer enjoy comically oversized surpluses and competing with the rest of the world on a more-equal footing for material wealth...
Even if the US never printed another dollar, we're running into a question of where stuff actually comes from. We could do Full Communism tomorrow, but it still won't do anything to keep the lights on under current consumption patterns. No economic system can squeeze extra toothpaste out of an empty tube.