Paul Krugman waxes about income inequality:
Apologists for rising inequality often argue that since most Americans’ income has risen despite rising inequality, there’s no reason to complain about inequality other than envy.
You see the contrast: a doubling of family incomes in the post war generation compared with maybe 20 percent since, and family incomes growing in line with GDP before, lagging far behind since, with the difference basically being the rising share of the 1 percent.
This is real stuff, not some trivial envy-driven concern. But we must be very, very quiet about it, right?
Krugman is very quiet about one thing: the fundamental change in the monetary system that took place in 1971, the year that Richard Nixon made the dollar a completely fiat currency by removing its peg to gold. After that event, income inequality has really raced ahead.
Now I know full well correlation does not imply causation. But I also know that giving central bankers free rein to print as much money to hand out like candy to their friends in big finance does imply that they will do it. How do I know that? Because they do:
From the Levy Institute:
The bottom line of crisis of 2007-9: a Federal Reserve bailout commitment in excess of $29 trillion.
My hypothesis is that leaving the gold standard was a free lunch: headline GDP growth could be achieved without any real gains in productivity, or efficiency, or in infrastructure, but instead by pumping money into the system and assuming that this would have a positive effect on the economy as a whole. After all — say the Keynesians — “aggregate demand (i.e. money circulation) is the state of the economy”.
But in reality “higher GDP” and “higher aggregate demand” just mean more money circulating. It’s perfectly possible for more money to circulate while the real economy (productivity, labour, technology, infrastructure, etc) deteriorates. In fact, in many respects this is exactly what happened during the Bush administration, where trillions of dollars of productive capital was burnt up on military adventurism.
Now maybe I have a thick skull. If so, could someone explain to me what I’m missing? The Federal Reserve was set free to print as much money as it wanted and give it to its friends with little oversight, and in the following years income inequality soared.
Seems like simple cause and effect.
