Price inflation is pretty rampant in the United States right now. However, the only thing that is keeping it from skyrocketing is the dip in gas prices, which has been due to the exploding oil shale and fracking operations within the U.S.
Gas prices, as the chart below will highlight, has dropped significantly since the summer because of the growing supply. Meanwhile, prices for an array of food items, like meat, vegetables and fish, are soaring.
Although price inflation is still riding high, it wont be until the Federal Reserve vast money printing seeps into the real economy that price inflation will be astronomical and personally affects every single American consumer. Also, this money printing will further diminish the value of the greenback.
Here is what Murray Rothbard wrote in “What Has Government Done to Our Money?“:
“Inflation, then, confers no general social benefit; instead, it redistributes the wealth in favor of the first-comers and at the expense of the laggards in the race. And inflation is, in effect, a race–to see who can get the new money earliest. The latecomers–the ones stuck with the loss–are often called the “fixed income groups.” Ministers, teachers, people on salaries, lag notoriously behind other groups in acquiring the new money. Particular sufferers will be those depending on fixed money contracts–contracts made in the days before the inflationary rise in prices. Life insurance beneficiaries and annuitants, retired persons living off pensions, landlords with long term leases, bondholders and other creditors, those holding cash, all will bear the brunt of the inflation. They will be the ones who are ‘taxed.'”
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