I think the comment about the music is ridiculous, but the broader point about free money causing the gradual degradation of food, housing, standard of living, etc. is not without merit.
> free money causing the gradual degradation of food, housing, standard of living, etc. is not without merit.
First, you have to establish that degradation has taken place. Considering that for most of civilizational history, the vast majority of people were wearing rags and eating grain porridge without spice or much salt and living in hovels, that doesn't seem obvious to me. Second, even if you do establish that, you have to specifically tie it to "fiat" currency and not some other factor. Those both seem like a tall order.
The factors leading to the dust bowl in the 1930s happened under the gold standard.
The government is prioritizing the wrong things, which is leading to today's degradation of food, but lack of government intervention also results in the degradation of food.
Housing quality and standard of living are at their best ever - if free money is causing that, thats not a terrible outcome
Well we are approaching half of americans having a chronic disease and a large part of that is from what we eat along with lack of exercise. it does seem like we have a degradation of the nutrients in our food supply as well.
Surely this is a problem of supply and not demand.
If I go to Safeway and don't find something healthy, I will nevertheless buy something for the simple reason that I am hungry. Want healthier food in a society? Sell healthier food in a society.
It's not the job of consumers, nor is there any reasonable communication channel, to dictate what is put on shelves. They can only provide feedback based on what is already there. If they have a limited selection, you will receive a censored signal, and you cannot judge the outcome based on counterfactuals of what they would have bought if something else was in the pool of offered products.
Above describes the folly of "demand-based" economic thinking. If there was truly an infinite supply and infinite variety of products, it makes sense to consider demand-based perspectives as actually expressing consumer desires. But it doesn't do that -- it only expresses preferences among the finite selection available, and you can very quickly sink into a feedback loop that encourages unhealthy diets by conflating the two perspectives.
' It's not the job of consumers, nor is there any reasonable communication channel, to dictate what is put on shelves. '
In a free market the job of consumers is to use communication channel of purchases to signal what they want to have stocked on the shelves. Safeway stocks junk food because that is what people buy.
Where is the answer to the problem? Signals are carried in codes, and codes can be more or less efficient at conveying information. How does a sample from a biased population provide any information about the true mean? How would offering only Cheez-its and Gatorade tell you about consumer desires for eggplant?
Many accuse their fellow humans of degeneracy but that narrative only serves to obfuscate the primary role of corporations, for which we can make much stronger accusations of degeneracy.
Dear reader, observe the classically crypto-fascist rhetoric with its complete lack of self-reflection and deflection via essentially empty-headed, debate-bro tactics.
There has never been a time in human history where a smaller percentage of the population faced starvation. Actual wars were fought over access to spices I can buy for three dollars at the supermarket.
Small changes in per-unit micronutrient quantities are not the cause of modern obesity. If you do want to make some claim that worldwide nutrition was better at some point in the past, that point was definitely not when Bach was alive.
What's really being said here is "people need to make better nutrition choices." Or can you support a claim that highly processed super-tasty engineered and mass-produced food is purely a function of ag subsidies? And that there would be no market pressure to create such a thing in your world.
It doesn't matter. Facts don't matter if you have spent significant amount of your life savings into magic internet money. Any news is contructed into 'this is good for bitcoin'. Even history itself is malleable, everything can be blamed on fiat (even though Bitcoin itself is fiat).
First, you have to establish that degradation has taken place. Considering that for most of civilizational history, the vast majority of people were wearing rags and eating grain porridge without spice or much salt and living in hovels, that doesn't seem obvious to me. Second, even if you do establish that, you have to specifically tie it to "fiat" currency and not some other factor. Those both seem like a tall order.