87.4% of population experienced a decline in freedom from 2020 to 2022 | Hacker News Reader

87.4% of population experienced a decline in freedom from 2020 to 2022

fraserinstitute.org

62 pointsmadihaa24 comments

CATO's Human Freedom Index uses inflation as a metric.

"87.4% of countries experienced pandemic related inflation" is a far less interesting premise.

If you consider inflation as a reduction of personal freedom, which is IMO quite a valid take, it becomes more interesting rather than less interesting to me.

Inflation over the amounts needed to stimulate the economy (2-4%) is unauthorized taxation. Kinda whack how everyone is just "okay" with working hard, paying taxes, then having the value of their work spent without their authorization.

Nice there are alternatives for saving.

By alternatives, I suppose you mean pyramid schemes that have no underlying investment that could beat inflation?

Yes like gold, real estate, and also arguably the index fund investment (that everyone buys into via 401k).

All these investments are only worth anything if someone buys them from you at a higher value.

Yes you can generate revenue from these but looking at increases in P/E ratios and real estate prices / income growth tells the story that the increases are primarily fueled by inflation.

For example compare the pre-pandemic and post-pandemic rent for a given apartment and you will see if the "underlying investment" is providing increasing value or if the value is the same or less for an older building but inflation is propping it up.

Call me crazy, but gold and RE didn’t track inflation 2019-now (during periods of high inflation).

Index funds put me way ahead of inflation

> All these investments are only worth anything if someone buys them from you at a higher value.

The index fund may be over priced but much of the market has actual productivity that leads to dividends eventually, so whether someone will buy that off you is not about the next sucker or betting on an increase in wealth among suckers.

In actuality fiat currency makes everything a pyramid scheme and allows the government to spend the wealth of the nation in whichever manner it deems fit, since the value of inflation accrues disproportionately to the asset owner (aka people who were there before you, aka pyramid scheme) vs. the earning productive class.

Inflation benifits the borrowers. Fist currency makes thing run smoothly when well managed, alternatives such as the gold standard have proven to be much worse that's why everyone switched

Technically true but highly misleading

the borrowers that just have a mortgage for their own house while working for a paycheck don't really benefit from it. Sure, their debt has been reduced, but their wage too. And inflation is generally lower then interest, so that benefit gets wiped too.

The by far biggest winners with inflation are the people that own a lot of assets.

People didn't switch because of stability problems with gold standard. That's just propaganda and fiat apologetics. As a matter of fact gold standard seen fastest and most stable growth in the history of human kind. Gold is hard to transport, secure and divide so ledgers were used instead which allowed government to just end goal standards to fund WW1 efforts, which also shows the magnitude of destruction and statist largese this enabled.

I recommend Broken Money for history and analysis how it came to be that things are how they are.

They literally did. They didn't want to go off the gold standard but they did because there was no choice and soon after each country went off the gold standard they started recovering from the great depression.

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/18tl490/abandoning...

The gold standard caused financial crash after crash

This is true but the government is the biggest borrower, who then immediately spends the funds by "awarding" contracts, obviously they don't have any corruption or favoritism when they do this, nor do they place trades using their insider knowledge of how the funds will be appropriated, which will definitely never impact the average citizen borrower (who is probably in need of borrowing money to buy a house, which is so expensive because... inflation)

So personal freedom is equivalent to spending power? To what end?

Spending power is a freedom, not freedom or the freedom. It's not equal, it's a part of.

Freedom of Speech seems to have very minimal consideration in this index, despite it being what I would consider the most foundational freedom of all.

It should be co-equal to the freedom of association, not foundational, as that would deprive us of liberty. As Mills pointed out in "On Liberty" at https://gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm :

> We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement.

Not to mention the one most eroded by governments and private corporations in the name of "COVID"

Title should be "87.4% of world’s population experienced a decline in freedom from 2020 to 2022"

"World's" in there is pretty important.

Ah, the American burger institute strikes again.

Could you expand on this

Libertarian "think tanks" are most often used as corporate tools to push an unpopular agenda for cynical reasons.

>"think tanks"? Because completely unlike libertarian think tanks, those with progressive or left and other agendas are not at all used as tools of any kind of corporate or political interest to push cynical agendas?

Why not look at the argument instead of cheaply, simplistically attacking the source based on your emotional, possibly ideological dislike?

Personal freedoms decreased during a global pandemic. Also water is found to be wet.

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