“Transitory” Shortages & Inflation Are Actually Your Quality Of Life Being Stolen Right Before Your Eyes Submitted by Quoth the Raven at QTR’s Fringe Finance, via Zero Hedge
There’s no doubt our country has all of a sudden slipped into the most precarious state we’ve been able to readily confirm with our own two eyes in decades.
We are suffering from runaway inflation, we have a monstrous labor shortage, and products we normally would have abundant access to are missing from store shelves. The country doesn’t produce anything anymore, we have doubled our Central Bank’s balance sheet in under two years and the money supply has gone parabolic.
And engineering solutions for these issues requires correctly identifying where the problem is coming from to begin with. It appears we can either go one of two directions when we try to deduce the cause of these issues.
Now is your chance to support Gospel News Network.
We love helping others and believe that’s one of the reasons we are chosen as Ambassadors of the Kingdom, to serve God’s children. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force.
The first direction we can go in is to point to monetary and fiscal policy and look at their direct effects on the state of the country and our economy. This, I believe, is the pragmatic approach to solving the issues our nation faces.
The second direction, according to a new Washington Post op-ed, is apparently to blame and shame ourselves for being greedy and assuming that we ever deserved such a quality of life to begin with.
The Post recently published a piece called “Opinion: Don’t rant about short-staffed stores and supply chain woes”, which put this argument on the table, basically telling people to shut up and be thankful for the little they have.
While normally I embrace the idea of being humble and thankful no matter how much or how little you have access to, the Post’s opinion piece brings an interesting concept into the foreground that I want to examine: what I am calling “the quality of life con”.
Let’s have a look at what the op-ed, written by award winner Micheline Maynard, argues. Maynard’s website notes that prior to working at the Washington Post, she worked for The New York Times and NPR.
In the op-ed, a photo of empty store shelves – very similar to the ones I used to effectively make my argument that the U.S. is turning into a third world country – accompanies an argument that it’s “time for some new, more realistic expectations,” as “Americans’ expectations of speedy service and easy access to consumer products have been crushed like a Styrofoam container in a trash compactor.”
“American consumers, their expectations pampered and catered to for decades, are not accustomed to inconvenience,” the op-ed states.
Its a convenient argument to make now, since when I make this “anti-comfort” argument about the importance of having a recession/depression and the Fed not stepping in the way every time those very same pampered consumers feel a little bit of financial unease, it is the left that casts me away as a conspiracy theorist and lunatic for advocating ushering in discomfort. Now, all of a sudden, because their policies brought on discomfort, the narrative changes to “lets all stop being so pampered all the time”.
“Rather than living constantly on the verge of throwing a fit, and risking taking it out on overwhelmed servers, struggling shop owners or late-arriving delivery people, we’d do ourselves a favor by consciously lowering expectations,” the piece says.
While I agree with not taking out our rage on service workers, like bartenders and servers – I was one for more than a decade and can tell you firsthand it doesn’t accomplish anything – this continues to fall under the “simply don’t be a dick” ruleset, and has nothing to do with “consciously lowering expectations” for our quality of life across the board.
