72% of the dollar's purchasing power was destroyed in just four episodes

Inflation obfuscates the value of money and therefore of goods, services, etc. In an environment where value is volatile, it makes sense to keep moving, keep trading, because you might come into possession of something that was undervalued before you owned it, or that you'll need in a future when it would otherwise be too expensive. The people who skim off the top of all of this activity love this environment.

Deflation, on the other hand, makes value readily and immediately apparent. What was speculative and risky goes to zero and people hold onto things with intrinsic value. Those who skim profit off of economic activity hate the slowdown, obviously, but maybe you need periods of this to reset when valuations becomes too far removed from reality.

Is it a bad thing for people to buy what they need, when they need it, instead of being forced by inflation to anticipate their needs further and further out?

Before the printing press, very few people in Europe owned even a single book. But even a lower class, modern European might easily own several dozen books. Depending on how you account for this, you might conclude that the given lower class, modern person is among the richest people in Europe in 1400. Or you might not properly account for the wealth of a 1400 European noble and rank them as middle class by modern standards.

It's simpler with commodities like a bushel of wheat, but still complicated. Depending on what you are trying to explain, you can use different methods but there is not straightforward way to convert the cost of something in one time period to another time period.

https://open.substack.com/pub/endtropy/p/trumps-enormous-c-l...

As your own reply alludes, electrification was clearly strategic move to reduce their risk in a scenario such as where we find ourselves today.

However, there are things that you can do with petroleum you can never do with batteries e.g. lubricants, asphalt, plastics, cosmetics, jet fuel, etc.

Agreed. Which is why the Chinese do NOT want their currency to become the Petrodollar or world's reserve currency. They know that that is what destroyed US Manufacturing. China wants to maintain their manufacturing dominance. They've seen what de-industrialization has done to the US.

USD reserve = print USD for everything liquidity to sustain debt financed existence where Triffin hollows out industry, and financialize everything because having stupid amount of liquidity incentivizes certain behaviors.

Petro-yuan = PRC gives swap lines to trusted partners to buy oil denominated in yuan in exchange for things like resources. Hormuz ships ~1 trillion USD worth energy that needs "swapping" - incidentally PRC imports around ~2-3 trillion, more than enough to cover.

So think petro-yuan = PRC gives trusted countries with resources that PRC bonds credit lines to buy yuan denominated energy (possibly at discount), in return they guarantee PRC resources or other commercial/geopolitical arrangements. It will be narrow, not like USD brrrting reserves.

This benefits PRC because get to have leverage over "need" transactions (countries need energy to survive, it's no negotiate) while US keeps supporting "want" transactions by reserve debt servicing blackhole that US cannot extricate itself from until it debases / technical defaults. PRC best game plan is... assume privileged part of exorbitant privilege, while leaving US the exorbitant.

Think about it, every single mother fucking year, the US roughly buys 1 trillion dollars more on services and goods from the rest of the world, than it sells.

It has this privilege/curse basically because the US dollar IS the world's global commerce and finance currency.

Trump attacked Iran thinking that this would somehow be good for the US, except it's weakening the petrodollar because it's pushed Iran to simply accept Yuan for oil.

The endemic anti-intellectualism among white communities (especially rural and southern) has resulted in a steady decline of white people in well-paying professions in America. If you count the Jewish as a separate group, white people are likely a minority in corporate America. Combined with social upliftment of other groups ("wokism") and the opioid crisis (that has disproportionately affected hinterland communities but immigrant groups seem immune to), white people are sliding down the American totem pole. Trumpism, alt-right, anti-woke, and the general resurgence of racist rhetoric are basically just reactions to all this.

These people want manufacturing because manufacturing is largely considered a "white people sport". If America becomes a manufacturing-first society, the hope is that it puts white people at the front and center of American society again.

JD Vance wrote a book about this.

Manufacturing is just their preferred lie to get otherwise intelligent people to support their insanity.

And the Heritage Foundation is not in the business of improving quality of life for everyone, or even the average American.

Create enough poverty and soon people will be willing to do an awful lot of things.

Under conditions of free trade with low-wage countries.

Free trade with low-wage countries is a policy choice, but a lot of people confuse it for a natural law.

How do you bring down costs? generally you'd need to restrict real estate. Lock down rent costs for both residential and commercial.

But the US is a major manufacturing nation anyway. US manufacturing output is more than half of that of China while having only a quarter of the population.

When groups like the far right say bring back manufacturing they are just posturing to those voters who have been disadvantaged by changes in the commercial landscape that reduces the number of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs. If they really cared about those people they would support massive improvements to education and training so that at least the next generation had a chance rather than idiotic schemes to 'bring back' the kinds of work that no one needs.

The Heritage guys have a weird perspective where they idolize the early Federalist US and the Reagan Era. Prosperity for the common man wasn’t a highlight of either era, to put it mildly.

In 1790s New York, for example, “local control” meant that many of the people of upstate New York were a sort of serf-like tenant living on the estates of the great men, Dutch patroons who played ball with the colonial and State political infrastructure. They had the freedom to pay rent until their landlord was willing to let them go. That existed into the 1840s, when the country started getting woke.

So we can address housing issues with creative solutions. Why do poor people need their own apartments? Stuff them into a tenement. You can easily fit 15 people in a two bedroom apartment so they can build drones or whatever.

The supposed "Military Industrial Complex" that Ike warned about died years later, and the end of the Cold War buried what little remained. The F-35 is basically the only big military construction project we've had in a very long time, and it comes at a few hundred airframes per year.

In WW2, we were producing 10k+ rather advanced airframes every single year. In each category.

The company that designed and built the M1 Abrams Tank doesn't really exist anymore for example. We, like Russia, might not really have a capability of building 4000 hulls in a short timeframe, which is table stakes if we are actually concerned about a war with China. We were able to do these things back in WW2 because we, through central planning (not a free market), reorganized like 1/20th of the economy into building war assets. FDR decreed that we build 120k Shermans. We eventually managed 50k.

A lot of the supposed "graft" and pork of the defense industry is about giving it a lot of leeway just to stick around. Once you lose domain knowledge it's gone forever, you have to expend considerable resources to rebuild and recollect it. No, documentation doesn't count. Reading all of our notes hasn't fixed the fact that Russia and China can't build the exceptional jet engines we can.

A neighborhood with just a Walmart doesn't have higher purchasing power than a neighborhood with just a Whole Foods.

China is actually the second-best contender now due to its growing military prowess. But it still might not be at the level where it can carry out the aforementioned task anywhere in the world without exception, like the US can. Hence the dollar will most likely stay.

Our wars are pre-paid for. America spends $900B/year on the military. Use it or lose it.

And making it not an option leads to the situations where rich buy assets that are only go up and become richer. Average Joe meanwhile does not own assets and gets poorer and poorer