What a couple of years!

Ouch. Even though prices are (slowly) dropping. Even the Rally in the Black Hills is showing signs of a drop in attendance and not just because it isn’t a zero- or five-year. Five-dollar Diesel and Four-dollar-plus regular with ethanol HURTS.

But not as much as other things. Look at this recent chart from Peter Ziehan:

“An energy-induced depression that is probably already affecting multiple continents.” China, Japan, SE Asia, South Asia, and Europe. NOT just due to Russia’s war in Ukraine and the idiotic European-American response, either. ESG and other woke nonsense – especially in DC and Brussels – can be blamed. And SHOULD be blamed.

The CPI does of course include this – and bad as inflation is in North America (the States, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean), the rest of the world (with the possible exception of Russia) is suffering more.

Not that our relatively low impact is not painful. Or that the regime in DC (and far too many States) isn’t trying to make Americans and other folks here on Turtle Island hurt more.

Although many economists view inflation as good, I fear that we here at TPOL – engineers, agriculture and resource folks, lovers of liberty – view it as an evil. At best a “tax” (and all that implies, including theft) and at worst a tool of tyranny, of those who believe they are the rightful rulers of humanity.

And we view government as being the chief proponent AND cause of inflation. Whether the old-fashioned way of debasing the currency (adding base metal to “God’s money” of gold and silver in coins, or reducing the size of the coins and other cons), the more modern device of printing more “money” (see 1920s Germany, Argentina several times, Zimbabwe, etc.), still more modern method of electronically “creating” money through the credit-debt process. AND through reducing supply by regulatory takings and other actions: more and more dollars chasing fewer and fewer goods, with demand remaining constant or increasing with population (and that wonderful device called advertising!) and expectations.

The solution? A simple one, yet difficult to implement: sound money. Money which is real money – and which by its very nature (tangible, long-lasting, measurable, understandable) is deflationary in nature. However evil that seems to orthodox economists.

Yet most politicians, economists, activists, and the general public view government as the solution to inflation – ignoring that it is the cause. So instead of fixing inflation, government ramps it up.