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Comment by dagaci | Hacker News Reader

Just to give unspoken point of view, a scenario which i would like to pose: That Income inequality provides a kind of fiscal stability vs uncontrollable inflation.

If you overlay a chart of inflation on top of the chart of inequality you will find that maximum equality appears to correspond closely to periods of maximum inflation.

Governments from both sides of the argument have focused on reducing collective bargaining and on ensuring that efforts to rejuvenate economies, like quantitative easing via the financial sector and tax breaks are focused on the corporations and wealthy precisely because of the low impact this can have on inflation

The effect of these measures tends to pump money into the already wealthy while bulk of the population experience no-change.

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Inflation isn't all bad.

The lack of inflation is making it easy to concentrate and safely hoard cash, which is cutting off the oxygen for everyone else. We've had 30 years of an ultra-safe, guaranteed strategy to make money -- move all value-added services to places with cheap labor and cheap money and export cash, facilitated by tithing a good portion of GDP to the OPEC producers. It's destroying western society.

The best thing that could happen to the west today would be a devaluation.

Yeah inflation can be good if you have debt.

That sounds like a side effect of the wealthy holding more passive assets and spending less of their income than an inherent virtue. Of course the real question is why inflation? Real wealth creation should cause inflation. There are far more goods available today and just subdividing the old currency won't cut it as a medium. "Was there earlier and held onto value doing nothing granting disproportionate gains" isn't a very good basis for resource allocation even if it personally works out well for some people. Or is the inflation from heavy spending devaluing the currency to try to pay everyone without any corresponding value? Inflation is just a symptom and may be beneficial, neutral, or pathological depending on context and cause.

Of course stability and inequality go together, that's how the system has always been. There's never been a culture that was both a world power and also egalitarian. In order to have the wealth inequality vanish, you change the value of things. It upsets the entire market and valuation of goods and society as a whole. Governments tend to focus on fixing things the way you're speaking because they're A- strong, already established governments and B- they have capitalists helping to make the decisions that stand to lose the most from a change in the marparadigm

You can't have a non-capitalist society and also care about inflation, since inflation is a product of capital/money.

Remember, most of Marxism is based on a central pillar of "The cause of all the world's evils is the inequitable distribution of goods across needs." People are less likely cares about money/inflation if all their needs are being met.

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