You can't help soften the blow of inflation by giving people more money! That will just cause more inflation and make everything worse!

We've all heard it a thousand times, giving normal working class people, especially poor people, more money will only make everything worse by causing more inflation. Somehow this will leave the majority worse off than if nothing had been done.

This is considered common sense among liberal-conservatives but as leftists we instinctively know that it is bullshit. Maybe higher wages and benefits would increase inflation but the net total is that the working class would be better off than before.

Instinct is not a very convincing argument though so how do you argue the case against the wage inflation spiral to liberal-conservatives?

  • silent_water [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    debtors tend to be the middle classes. it takes money to afford debt. it's why there's a ton of talk about how the government should stop giving people student loans as a solution to the student loan debt crisis - debt is a privilege of class, despite the fact that it's how this economic system functions. so yes, inflation tends to be good for people with debt - but it's too slow to help those with predatory loans and those who are struggling to pay in the present.

    • CrimsonSage [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I mean I don't completely disagree with you, but I don't think in our modern economic context that it can be said that debt is the purview of only the bourgeois and labor aristocracy, basically everyone has some level of debt now. That being said I also don't think that spiking inflation is a good strategy for the working class either, as we are seeing now with our current bout of inflation the bourgeois state does defend capital such that even in conditions that would be objectively bad for it capital still comes out ahead; without class power simple fluctuations in the flows of commodities of all kinds will always favor capital. All that being said I feel comfortable with my assertion that in general capital does dislike inflation because it erodes financial capital stock, and or the growth thereof, as well as generating long term destabilization in the system.