Roshi, you said a lot there. I'm having a hard time understanding it all. Please bear with me on this. I'm trying to understand a cause and effect. Chicken or egg. If I am following right you say that the removal of the gold standard made everyone charge more for goods and services. How did the people get the money into their pockets to pay for these things? Moms went to work. Where did these jobs come from? Was it to compete with those charging more? But the outsourcing and importing were providing us with cheaper goods.
You mentioned consumerism. I fault of the individual for this. We all want more and would like to afford all of these things. We are getting these things and making them essentials in our lives. Now I don't want to go back to the days of the ice box but does a refrigerator need to have 5 separate temperature controlled areas with ice and water dispensers? That's what we are buying. What do we really need from our cars? Get us from point A to point B. Heat and AC. Some listening device for news and good music when we are bored. Do we need a chip installed with personal settings for my seat and mirrors? We buy them too. Is it that much difference between a 720 and a 1080 television? I don't the fed can be blamed for our consumption that stuff.
I agree with you bob that a nation sustained on utter consumerism is not healthy even though the result has been cheaper goods but as I have stated previously when Nixon went to China back in the 70s, his ordered dealings with the Chines government helped to set the stage for much of the outsourcing that has gone on since then leading up to the present day free trade agreements which have hurt major manufacturing in the US workforce, and as far as price changes go, I am a not a top currency expert but yes when a nation delinks its currency from a real physical tangible asset like gold and silver, the only reason why that currency holds any value is because the people using that currency for buying and selling goods and services "believe" and have "confidence" in that currency as a medium of exchange, you see this is what gives the dollar its world reserve status, people still have a great amount of "confidence" in the US dollar, it is a franchise the private owners of the federal reserve bank control and will continue to expand the brand, now since these federal reserve notes (green paper as opposed to gold which has been a store of wealth for 5,000 years) at present are backed by nothing more than the good faith and credit of the US, the banks can monetize debt and print as much of them as they need to pay bills because these notes have been depegged from any tangible hard physical gold and silver measurement, hence economics 101 tells us that the more of this green funny money they print, the more of them will enter into circulation and eventually the results are inflationary because it takes more of these federal reserve notes to buy the same number of goods and services, so what this means for the average worker trying to make a living is a slow and steady decrease in his purchasing power because if that employee is not getting regular COLA increases to make up for that creeping inflation then he or she can never get ahead or break even, that worker will always be behind no matter how much more overtime they do and IMO its disgusting how the central banks know how their actions are hurting the people BUT they don't care because they have agendas that are going to be met one way or another, another point of note is that 4/5 of US dollars in circulation today are traded outside of the US which helps to stem inflation but if for some reason those dollars started to make their way back into the US (like what happened right after world war 1) then we would see instant inflation, also as I have stated there is a total of 12 trillion in MXM money (money that is hot, liquid and can be used at any time) that is just sitting in people's bank accounts across the US, if for some reason, the people started feeling really good and decided to go on massive shopping spree all at once then in this scenario you would also see instant inflation, I hope this explains my previous comment a little better
