06-02-2016, 03:58 PM
(06-02-2016, 10:18 AM)Mikebert Wrote: [Galen]That spike in 1980 was the Hunt brothers trying to corner the silver market which wouldn't have happened under a gold or silver coin standard.
[Mike]Exactly. That was my point, you cannot extrapolate the value of a 1964 minimum wage of 0.96 oz silver to today using the market silver prices. You can using one of the inflation indices like the CPI. The point is, under a gold standard the ratio of the CPI and the POG is range bound with the former rising above the latter during wars and then falling back to the baseline afterward.
Even more, the economy is very different. The American economy was very different from what it is now. 52 years ago (it has been that long since the US Mint coined silver for dimes and quarters) the basis of the American economy had far more emphasis on tangible goods. If we wanted information we bought it in the form of printed material. One needs no longer buy this
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19942?ms...e_stranger
(Candide) as a dead-tree edition. Electronic representations have become much more inexpensive than paper, ink, and binding. I have not bought a public-domain book since I found Project Gutenberg a few years ago.
Figure also that electronic innovations have made some of our entertainment devices far cheaper. How cheap? A 25" diagonal TV is now rather small... but there was a time when having a 25" diagonal color TV truly impressed all but the snobs. Of course that 25" diagonal color TV may have had "French provincial" cabinetry, generally not available today. Get your own d@mn cabinet, which is still very expensive because it itself is a "dead tree edition". Encyclopaedia Britannica last published a print version set several years ago.
The early-industrial stuff like furniture, TV dinners (they are still sold, but not as such anymore because "TV" no longer impresses people), Waterford crystal, refrigerators, automobiles, stoves, and stereo speakers (the latter are not high-tech devices) have risen in price with inflation. Blank-check economics, the norm for much in American life, works as exploitatively as one would expect.
Of course raw labor has become incredibly cheap. People can live on the minimum wage, but they would have to be stuffed like sardines into decrepit trailers or apartments. Poverty is the pervasive American nightmare, and we all fear it almost as much as the Grim Reaper. Maybe even more.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.