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by notahacker 1661 days ago
To the extent capitalist speculation on housing as an inflation hedge drives up the prices of assets workers store much of their wealth in, it benefits them a lot more than "not bothering to invest in anything at all, least of all job creation" being the rich's hedge against deflation

If it "makes sense to you" that the lack of Gold Standard is the real reason workers are poor, it probably helps to consider that workers were much poorer for the vast majority of human history with a Gold Standard...
1 comments
throwaway248329 1661 days ago
>If it "makes sense to you" that the lack of Gold Standard is the real reason workers are poor, it probably helps to consider that workers were much poorer for the vast majority of human history with a Gold Standard...

That doesn't tell much. Anyone was much poorer for the vast majority of human history.

How do you explain the wealth inequality trend change starting from 1971? https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

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notahacker 1661 days ago
It doesn't, for the most part. In most of the graphs its pretty obvious the rich getting richer bit happened in the 1980s, not the 1970s. It's also obvious their share of wealth was particularly large in the 1920s, when there was a very pure gold standard. (And of course back when most people were so much poorer there wasnt even enough food to go around, the rich still had palaces, servants and mountains of gold to fund wars to engage in the most profitable economic activity of capturing other people's gold)

But obviously the people who advocated the tax cuts for the rich in the 1980s are highly, highly motivated to pretend it was leaving Gold Standard several years earlier that did it. Not least because going back to a gold standard would allow them to make that gap even bigger - the 1% could HODL the 30% their wealth in risk free, liquid, appreciating coins instead of having to take actual risks and create actual jobs. But the deflation that preserves their wealth as they withdraw from funding productive activity is - quite literally - everyone else's wages and sales revenues going down.

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throwaway248329 1661 days ago
Sure, it's possible that the wealth disparity rise happened for other reasons, not related with gold standard.

However, I can still look at those charts and say that the gold standard does not harm the poor the way you imply it does.

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notahacker 1661 days ago
Sure, but the original discussion wasn't concerning the rare exception to the rule the gold standard hurts the poor (a brief period between 1958 and 1971 in the US which started with half the world's gold supply, and so growth and inflation took occurred as normal).

The original discussion was concerning the insane fantasy that the US economy would be better off backed by a deflationary cryptocurrency than the US dollar.

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