The end of gold

Compare the cost of healthcare as proportion of GDP with the cost in Singapore, which has a healthcare system in which most people pay the full price right out of their pocket at the receptionist’s desk or, often, the doctor’s desk, same as you pay any other expert. It is obvious that the standard of care in Singapore is way higher than in the US, while its cost is a tiny fraction of the cost – albeit the up front out of pocket cost is pretty harsh. When I say it is way cheaper, I meant as a fraction of GDP, not what you have to pay to see the doctor.

Though the price is not that bad. The hotel doctor showed up at my room when I needed him in Singapore. Try that in the US.

So, forced spending is a tiny fraction of the value of free spending. The doctor in the US is not going to come to you.

No rabbit hole. The difference between forced spending for which you supposedly receive some value, and thugs threatening to burn down your home if you do not pay ransom, is too small to make a significant difference to national accounts.

As for “monopolies”. What monopolies?

> For nearly all intents and purposes, the healthcare you will get there is as good as the healthcare you will get here.

Hell no. Healthcare in Singapore is way better than in the US. The difference is like day and night, and frequently like life or death.

India is way cheaper than Singapore, but the private healthcare is inferior – but it is not that much inferior, in terms of value for money, you get a better deal than in India than you get in Singapore. But sometimes you care about value more than money, and the value in Singapore is way higher than India or America.

If you pay for private healthcare in India, you pay less than the US, and get comparable value, and better value for money, but it is plausibly claimed that US healthcare is better. Maybe it is, I would not know and it is hard to tell.

Hey, don’t you remember all the complaints about people hoarding toilet paper and stuff?

I remember empty shelves all over the place. No toilet paper. No bread flour. No rice. If anything the situation has eased for common goods like toilet paper, rice and flour, but considerably worsened for specialty goods. I am guessing that the supply chains for standardized commodity goods have small stockpiles relative to demand, small stock to flow ratio, so the shock hit them first.

It is plausible that the lockdowns suppressed demand for specialty goods where people don’t have to regularly buy a certain quantity of those goods, but those are goods where you can generally delay buying them for a while, but eventually you are going to buy them, which is now happening.

If the lockdowns suppressed demand, we would not see shortages.

There was no massive increase in demand for toilet paper. At least not until after it ran out and everyone then realized that they needed to stockpile.

And it was not just “that one good”. I saw shortages across the board. After the toilet paper panic, there were the this, that, and the other panics – which panics were well founded.

You always hear the cry about hoarders when state intervention breaks supply chains. It is never true, and it certainly was not true this time around. No one thought toilet paper was going to run out until it did.

I would go to the shops for common commodity goods, and they just were not there. That has eased now for common commodity goods, but always I noticed empty shelves first, then panic, then outrage about hoarders, in that order.

That was simply my experience when shopping. Now that has eased substantially, and commodity prices have risen substantially, but specialty goods are crunching hard. If the same pattern continues for specialty goods, they should shoot up too, and we should soon hear more official denials of inflation, and more media accounts telling us that we are not experiencing inflation.

Aqiduka, your inability to respond to our actual position is shill like. None of your responses acknowledge that everyone here thinks that the consumer price index has long been fake, and that in the last year or so it has suddenly very rapidly started to get more fake, faster. You are responding as if I was quibbling about the details of how it is calculated, rather than I said that they just pull it out of their asses.

That the supposed evidence of your own eyes disagrees with the evidence of my eyes is also suggestive. Are your eyes looking at the goods on the counter when you put your money down on the counter, or looking at official reality?

> I specificaly went by peope’s lived experience

Other people seem to be living a different experience.

The lived experience at the petrol pump resembles the lived experience of anyone buying any spot priced commodity good, such as lumber, and sticky priced goods are getting harder to find. When they are easy to find, they have already gone up. Shortages are hidden inflation, and we are seeing a whole lot of shortages. Your dollar is still being debased if it cannot buy stuff at the official price, which debasement manifests as delaying the purchase till “normality returns” or buying from scalpers. When normality in that good does return, you will find the list price has risen.

Stuff that is short comes on sale from time to time, and sale price resembles the old list price, but not the old sale price, and you need to be quick off the mark. I just got the last air fryer that was on sale, and the price was fine and I was happy, but two years ago I would have thought that a list price, not a sale price, and would not have been all that happy. Also I had been trying to buy that air fryer for months, and it was unavailable anywhere at any price. Plus they did not want me to buy that air fryer – they wanted me to buy some other air fryer. It was a teaser to get people into the shop. In the next few days, lots of people will be coming into the shop, asking for that air fryer, and they will not get it. The sale is still on but the teasers are running out.

Everyone knows about the chip shortage, but it is not a chip shortage – the problem is general with sticky priced goods, some more, some less. When I buy any brand name electronics, either list prices have risen, or I am paying scalper prices on Ebay, or I spend the whole day hunting for a retailer who has it at list, and every retailer tells me he has it on back order.

I am spending a hell of a lot more time hunting for goods that just are not there than I used to, and for spot priced goods, steel, lumber, fuel, meat, I am paying substantially higher prices.

> I acknowledged and repllied to every relevant point made here.

No you did not. you reframed those points as if the person making the point accepted the official narrative, resulting in a lot of repetitive waste of space and talking at cross purposes.

You would acknowledge a point that was fundamentally different from the point in fact made, and then your interlocutor would repeat his original point, and you would again acknowledge a point different from that he had made, and just made all over again.

> And I imagine lumber and copper are such large parts of your purchases as a consumer [/sarcasm].

Lumber is a substantial part of my purchases. I have not purchased copper in a while, but when shopping for other metals I noticed it was just not there, so I have no idea what is happening to its price. Lumber, like fuel, is hurting me. Been using galvanized steel more.

I am paying about double what I am used to paying for meat, and I buy a lot of meat.

Some businesses have stockpiles of recycled timber, and have not yet realized that they should have raised the prices on it.

> do you find you can buy abou the same with the same wage or not.

No I cannot. This year I have spent a lot more than last year, and, because of shortages and because of genuine uncertainty among both buyers and sellers as to what prices are reasonable and realistic, spent a lot more time and effort trying, frequently unsuccessfully, to buy stuff.

My cost of living, the amount of money I spend just to do the things I am accustomed to doing, has unambiguously risen substantially. Money is going out substantially faster than I am accustomed to. I want a roast, and it costs nearly twice as much as I am accustomed to paying.

The uncertainty we are seeing about reasonable and realistic prices is making it difficult to do business, difficult for the ordinary shopkeeper, and difficult for the ordinary consumer.

It is impacting bookkeeping. You buy some goods, and sell them for substantially more than you paid for them – but discover you are selling them for less than the cost of replacing them. Did you make a profit or a loss? This is biting small businesses, and it is biting big businesses worse. Money has functions four, a medium, a measure, a standard, a store. The shortages are fiat money failing as a medium of exchange. Price uncertainty and book keeping troubles are it failing as a measure of value. People who are still using it as a standard for deferred payments and a store of value are likely to get burned, because such use presupposes usefulness as a medium and a measure, and usefulness as a medium and a measure has obviously, visibly, and undeniably deteriorated.

> my own savings are growing at about the same rate

My savings are diminishing at an alarmingly increased rate.

If you speak the truth, you may well have adjusted to diminished supply of sticky priced items by postponing purchase until things “return to normal”. You may be saving increasingly worthless money, while failing to acquire goods. It is obvious that a great many people are doing that.

I earlier remarked have “you filled up gas tank lately”. Have you purchased a roast lately? The price of wheat, rice, and flour has spiked . They have spiked before, but every commodity good is spiking simultaneously, which makes it unlikely that these are just temporary spikes caused by particular events in particular industries. Rent is up, food is up, fuel is up, housing prices are up. Bread is the very emblem of the cost of living.

Since I do not expect things to return to normal, I instead considerably increased my efforts to acquire goods that were not always easy to obtain and while I experience plenty of painful inflation in spot priced, second hand, and scalper priced goods, the major cost to me has been increased effort needed for acquisition of sticky priced goods.

For me, the major impact has not been rising prices as such, but diminished utility of fiat money as a medium of exchange.

But someone who thinks prices will return to “normal”, and supply will return to normal at the old prices, is going to go on the waiting list for a new car, or the waiting list for a new video card, rather than buy a second hand car at prices that are considerably higher than they used to be, or a scalper price for a video card, thus his savings will increase. And if he finds that lumber has gone up a lot, he will postpone his building project, rather than just pay, or find substitutes for lumber, or find a merchant with a stockpile of old second hand timber who has not yet realized that he is sitting on a pot of gold.

“oh it is just fuel”

“oh it is just fuel and lumber”

“oh it is just fuel, lumber, and metals”

“oh it is just fuel, lumber, metals, and meat”

“oh it is just fuel, lumber, metals, meat, and second hand cars. And second cars hand cars don’t matter because anyone affluent puts his name on the waiting list for a new car”

“oh it is just fuel, lumber, metals, meat, second hand cars, and housing, and bread, and rice and …”

You don’t seem like a shill, but what you are seeing in the wider world differs from what I am seeing in the wider world, which inclines me to doubt that your lived experience is different from mine. You might have a different lived experience, but you should not be seeing a different wider world.

You claim your savings are increasing at about the same rate – which is likely true, because a lot of people’s savings are increasing. If there is more fiat money around, some people obviously will have more fiat money. But their capacity to translate that money into goods, such as buying a car, has obviously diminished. For second hand cars because the price has gone up, for new cars, there is a waiting list.

And for second hand lumber, because I cleaned out the last of it in a warehouse near me, from a merchant who when he replenishes his stockpile will likely find he sold it to me for less than the cost of replacement.

Lots of plans exist, and are being implemented. Their problem is that have rather too many large conspiracies, and rather too many conspirators. The error is thinking that there is one big tightly disciplined conspiracy. There are several big tightly disciplined conspiracies, not all of them all that tightly disciplined, and all of them engaging in entryism against each other, as some of them are engaging in entryism against us.

> What’s important about your ideal, though, is that it doesn’t just require Phil Robertson, it requires thousands of personnel to staff all of the different faculties, and the will and the personnel to go after any subsequent holdouts (say Yale and Princeton convert, but Cornell stubbornly refuses).

The facilities are bloated, and need to be radically reduced in size, particularly the universities. All we need is a Phil Robertson with the Inquisition standing behind him and Caesar standing behind the Inquisition. More than enough Havel’s Greengrocers will remain.

> > All we need is a Phil Robertson with the Inquisition standing behind him and Caesar standing behind the Inquisition.

> Yes, this is all we need. It is a very tall order. The Inquisition is not a few inquisitors, it is an army – the priestly equivalent, anyway.

An inquisition is at most a hundred or so – if it is any bigger, it has grown out of control, and is itself a threat to the power of the sovereign. It is not an army, it is backed by the army.

A Phil Roberson get appointed Dean of Harvard. He finds a handful of people, five or six, who pass the shill test. He invites all professors to re-apply for their old jobs or equivalent jobs. His people do the interviews, or the shill test part of the interviews. Havel’s Greengrocer gets his job back, provided he also passes an IQ test, is of good character, and has well raised children of good character. The fanatics don’t. Aggressively confronting the authority of the Dean as an individual “you can’t fire me” results in the inquisition taking you away for a friendly chat over coffee and ham sandwiches. Aggressively confronting the authority of the Dean as a mob results in the army hosing down the general area of the riot with napalm and machine gun fire, possibly destroying numerous ugly modernist buildings in the process. Everyone in Yale, Princeton, and MIT gets the message. By the time we get around to them, we will discover that that they have already found someone sufficiently like Phil Robertson.