Tariffs and sky high audio prices.

People are really clever, creative, greedy and stingy. All you have to do is let them trade among themselves and over time you get a lot more really good stuff at lower and lower prices. Exactly what happened over the roughly 100 years of sound money due to the gold standard.

Prices, like I already said, were remarkably stable in the US for 300 years. Its a fact. You could look it up. The track record was not perfectly flat. A few wars created some inflationary spikes when paper money was created to fund the wars. But standard items like a bushel of corn or wheat were virtually the exact same price at the end as at the beginning, 1600 to 1900.

Seriously people. Its a fact. You could look it up. Really. You should.

Then consider how many tariffs, and a lot bigger ones, were enacted back then. So drop the ideas mentioned. They are contradicted by the facts of history.

Tariffs in the current circumstances are wonderful. Not perfect. Nothing ever is. But the downsides are all relatively small and limited and short term while the upsides are all big and widespread and long term. Already we are seeing more investment and hiring. Only gonna get better the longer it goes on.

This same exact thing happened back in Colonial America. Naysayers will have to contend with the reality of how beneficial tariffs were then.

So why do prices rise then? Because instead of money we have debt. Pull a bill out of your wallet, if you even have one, and look at it. Federal Reserve Note, it says. Well, its private, not Federal. There are no reserves. And do you know what a note is? Its a loan. When you buy a house you sign a note. A promise to pay. A mortgage. The literal translation of which is "death pledge."

So, in other words, a Federal Reserve Note is an IOU. Which if you visit any coin store or look on-line its interesting to follow the history of this fake currency as over the years it deteriorates from being coined of actual gold or silver bullion to paper with a literal claim on those metals to a promise to be exchanged to .... nothing. Today it is not even exchangeable for anything. The "dollar" is not a dollar. And the Federal Reserve Note is an IOU

An IOU what? An IOU NOTHING!

There’s the crime at the root of it all.

Actually, if memory and google serves me correctly, the tariffs exacerbated the Great Depression, not caused it. They came about a year after the 1929 stock market crash. It’s a linear thing.

And there is a leading, noted, Nobel Prize winning economist who thinks otherwise:

"But didn’t the Smoot-Hawley tariff cause the Great Depression? No. There’s no evidence at all that it did. Yes, trade fell a lot between 1929 and 1933, but that was almost entirely a consequence of the Depression, not a cause. (Trade actually fell faster during the early stages of the 2008 Great Recession than it did after 1929.) And while trade barriers were higher in the 1930s than before, this was partly a response to the Depression, partly a consequence of deflation, which made specific tariffs (i.e., tariffs that are stated in dollars per unit, not as a percentage of value) loom larger."

--Paul Krugman

All the best,
Nonoise

The Federal Reserve was created in 1913. Prior to that, if you can be bothered to look up the facts, there was essentially zero inflation in the US. Pretty sure you will find the word did not even exist, at least not in the monetary sense. Why would it? You cannot inflate a currency when it is minted from solid metal that can only be created by human effort digging it up, refining, coining.

Once the Fed was created what happened? Immediately we had the Roaring Twenties. For the first time we had inflation. Real inflation. The slogan, "What we need is a good ten cent cigar" came about because people wanted a return to the low stable prices that had been the norm prior to the Fed.

It was the banksters loose money policies that created the Roaring Twenties, and the Feds monetary measures that created the Great Depression. Which by the way was a deflation. Two things, inflation and deflation, the US had never really experienced, in peace time, prior to the Fed.

Paul Krugman won a Nobel Prize in Economics, about which it helps to know a couple things. One, its not a Nobel Prize. The so-called nobel prize in economics was established in 1968 by the Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden.

Get it? The banksters hi-jacked the Nobel imprimatur, paid for their own prize, to promote their own interests. Its a crock.

Which explains Paul Krugman being such a load of you know what. Hard to think of a more disgraced excuse of an economist or one who has gotten more things more wrong more widely published.

Aside from that, all the best!

@millercarbon,
In all seriousness, are you on a Kool-Aid IV drip that you pull around on rollers?

The Great Depression was caused by misdirected monetary policies of the Federal Reserve. The "Roaring 20s" were roaring for a reason. The economy was overheated by the Fed's policies. Then they tightened up the money supply too far and the economy crashed.

FDR exacerbated the problem, extending what would have been a normal business cycle downturn with all of his convoluted make-work programs, excessive spending, and the confiscation of gold coin and bullion in 1933. 

 FDR is credited by the left as "getting us out of the great depression." It's become common knowledge despite its falsehood. Nothing could be further than the truth. There were more unemployed at the start of FDR's third term than there was at the beginning of his first term. The unemployment rate actually hit 25%.

The Smoot/Hawley act deepened the depression even further. As stated, what was a normal business cycle turndown, was turned into a major depression of long-standing and major suffering because of government meddling in the private sector where it didn't belong.

Like all wars, including economic ones, the government always comes out more powerful and overreaching than before the war began.

millercarbon ...

Man, you are dead-nutz on with your comments on the money issue. If only the majority of Americans understood the information you posted above, things could really be amazing. 

When I was a kid, I remember magazine ads and Sears catalogs that had all prices posted. That was when prices were extremely stable. You won't see that today unless what you are buying is in the here and now.

This is all audio related as far as prices are concerned. There is a reason that high-end amplifiers are selling for twice the price of my first house, and cables are selling for more than I paid for that brand new 1965 Plymouth hardtop with the 383 ci engine.

Oh, and I don't think I mentioned the brand new VW Bug I bought in 1972 for $1,800. That represented less than two month's pay at the time.  

Frank