Raul Freitas

Pass the Bucks

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Inflation. How do you describe something that was never meant to be wholly understood? Add to that the fact that there is no consensus, (in the economist universe), on how to go about dealing with it. In the end, those that generally don’t really “get it”, are the ones with the ultimate power to affect it. I’m talking about us, by the way, the ones at the foot of the mountain that everything gets tossed from.

Capitalists, the real ones, are constantly hurling numbers at us. Indexes, percentages, formulas and calculations of every sort, all designed to bewilder us little folk with their high-and-mightyness-induced super intelligence. In response, most of us nod and shrug our burdened shoulders and accept such “facts” as the inevitability of life and our much-loved “system”. After all, if the talking heads are saying such complicated things, then they have to be true. Yet there’s always something going askew, always some hiccup or snag. Somehow, this god, known as The System, seems to have a great deal of trouble keeping the ship steady. No fear though, we’re always here to prop it up when it begins to list. If the cost of doing business rises, have no fear! We’ll help, just charge us more! That’s, kind of, a way to explain inflation, but wait, there are other ways. The pandemic hit and many couldn’t leave the house to work, so governments kicked in some cash to help alleviate the shortfall. When the pandemic subsided, people began picking up where they left off and began to spend money, but the pandemic also hit the supply chain pretty hard, so the things that people wanted to buy were available in lesser quantities, what do suppliers do? Raise prices! Another way to, kind of, explain inflation. Here’s a thought, (I’m sure it’s not an original one), how about if instead of passing the higher costs onto us, companies ate some themselves? Lower profits…it might not go over well. That kind of thinking might not be very capitalistic, but would sure help keep prices down even during times of rising costs. It’s that strange new concept of working together, for everyone’s benefit.

The talking heads, (not the band), also say that a minimal amount of inflation, around 2% annually, makes the Economy god happier because a healthy economy is one that continuously grows. A growing economy gets people spending money, which, in turn, gets producers to produce even more. Also, it is written that people’s salaries supposedly accompany the moderate inflation rate and thus keep spending. In someone’s perfect existence, these formulas might work, but, as we all know, we live in an anything but a perfect existence. We are vulnerable, easily-influenced, emotional beings, living on a planet where with a balanced, but vulnerable ecosystem where all resources are finite. We can’t run our existence with silly numbers and formulas that serve the very few, in detriment of the rest. They keep feeding us numbers and we keep gorging on them. We make it so easy. We’ve seen unprecedented, unimaginable rises in our costs, yet we keep believing that everything will work out as long as we’re patient. Things haven’t been working out for decades. Deep down, we all know that we’re being herded and steered. There are better ways to organize a society, and to figure them out we must start from square one, discarding the current ways altogether. A herculean task, I’ll admit, but any idea of worth requires immense effort and to make changes of this magnitude will be completely uncharted territory.

At the start of this article, I referred to the fact that we control things like inflation. It all boils down to how much money we spend. If prices are too high, don’t spend, thus causing them to eventually recede. This is obviously much harder than it sounds, but we can’t go on convincing ourselves that things will realistically go our way without any pain or sacrifice. Governments are themselves governed by the Market god, so we have to take these matters on ourselves, and it’s not by reading headlines and wagging fingers that things will improve. All these corporations are happily reporting RECORD profits, paying bonusses to their executives for a job well done. We have to do more than stock up on toilet paper.
Fiquem bem.

Raul Freitas/MS

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