I think that the best way to have prevented this from happening in the first place would have been to either
A. Not print money (or)
B. Not print more money then what is held in gold

My logic (if you’d call it that is that a lot of confusion occurs when a pay check is reduced. As was pointed out, no one wants to go from making 10 bucks an hour to 8, even if it means that 8 dollars=11, it’s too psychologically frightening.

With a “moneyless” system, however you don’t have to worry about being the greedy bad politician who is lowering Minimum wage, because there was never a minimum wage in the first place. A dollar today would have the same value as a dollar had when the US dollar came to be. It’s value would be rooted on the value of gold (or whatever preciousness it would be valued on).

Of course, the ‘moneyless’ boat sailed out along time ago. The Inflation/deflation system has it’s tentacles too thoroughly around the economy for it to be shaken off (at least IMO).

Instead, if/when a cycle such as the deflation one occurs, the wise idea IMO, in addition to other things, would be to increase tariffs.
I know, there’s much hissing and gnashing of the teeth, but this is the logic (again most likely stretching the term:)

IF prices go up on foreign widgets, that means that purchasers gain a strong incentive to buy domestic (duh) and that domestics prices can afford to go up, since foreign buying prices are artificially raised to what ever the tariff tells it to be. Then prices go up, companies make the bones, and can afford to hire more people. Isolationist though this may be, it is what needs to happen in instances of deflation IMO, at least temporarily as an aid to help with deflation issues. Obviously if it is a state or local issue then state or local tariffs are called for.
Really a free global market only benefits the ones that are capable of competing in it, as that isn’t the majority of the American people, I can’t see how its in our nations interest.(though I am more then happy to learn:)
OF course, with things like NATO and other free market obligations, what can many do now? Stop the people who keep those things in place. duh.

(Crazy rant start)
I say people start using the system to rebuild the system. Voting, yes protesting great, but what about lobbyist groups? The power of the dollar rivals the power of the vote, and I am sure if the cash is right many would be politicians would champion the cause if it meant they’d have the doe to get elected. Imagine the amount of power the honest voter would have if lobbing was eliminated. Use lobbying to end lobbying. Sounds just crazy enough to work.(Crazy rant end)

When Reddit said

“The root causes of such apprehension are largely uninvestigated and simply assumed to be unresolvable without government intervention”

I am tempted to think that the cause of such apprehensions is a many faceted thing. Lack of ambition (guilty) is one of them, sub-par education another.

As for the deflation itself, I welcome it. I say that with my eyes wide open as to its effects, some of which have hit people I know and care about and some of which may yet hit me. I see and welcome deflation for the necessary correction that it is.

Consider: When banks don’t have a central bank to act as lender of last resort and are in open competition, they cannot inflate too heavily or their receipts tend to accumulate in competitors’ vaults, word gets around, and their behavior is put in check. With a central bank, all banks are enabled to inflate simultaneously. Since inflation (strictly speaking all fiat emission in excess of actual reserve requirements) benefits the prime lenders and its affiliated large industries first, this wave of central-bank enabled inflation allows massive investment in large industries that might be in excess of what a more rational (read: conservative) uninflated economy could support. With a central bank acting as the enabler, banks can thus inflate the system to the point that grotesque misallocation of funds create parasitic industries everywhere. It doesn’t take a genius to see that once limits to growth kick in and demand diminishes, too many houses and too many cars and too many Home Depots and too many Starbucks have nowhere to go but to lose value, contract, or otherwise diminish in whatever form the deflation takes as demand destruction of credit nukes that magic money that was loaned into existence through fractional reserve lending.

To champion an inflationary policy to sustain–and repeat–this process of boom and bust is to my thinking a dishonest and immoral policy. People’s lives are destroyed in these booms and busts. You’d champion it’s repeat performance? How thoughtfully helpful for your bottom line, but it can and will destroy others. This is no surprise; people tend to be naive in their own self interest.

The groups who tend to gain through all this are the prime lenders and those who own them. Don’t forget, title to real property was taken as collateral on so many of those loans, and with the interlocking margin calls at play, those titles can migrate upward to a zenith of ownership in which property is concentrated in the hands of the very people who put this system into place. That this utterly contrived system is exposed as the fraud it is and called a “failure of the free market” is perhaps the biggest insult of all. There is no free market evident when the money power has achieved control of the government though regulatory capture and perception management through media consolidation. They have you decrying the very system that would extricate you from this mess of marketdroid control.

Wake up people. You can be as ‘pragmatic’ as you want and say that nothing will change and no one going to abolish central banks or fractional reserve lending, but don’t complain when your grandchildren have nothing and slave for the elite core of monolithic control. And don’t blame the ‘free market’ that was nowhere to be seen as you championed more and more centralization–and abstraction–of market controls.

Now, I’m not big into politics of either side, but the logical comments supporting fiscal conservation kinda made sense to me. The other side of the comments made me feel like I was hated and had done something awful to the commenter just by showing up here and reading.

To all the people who hated GWB, I get it. I didn’t like him much, either. But that doesn’t mean that being a fiscal conservative is somehow evil, greedy, or manipulative…. it’s actually quite the opposite if you think about it long enough.

Otherwise, why wouldn’t deflation continue on forever?

Do you realize that “Roads, Schools, Police, Fire, Military” only constitute about a third of all government spending?

From Cato’s blog today: “State/local fire, police, and corrections spending amounts to just 4 percent of total government spending in the United States.”

http://www.census.gov/govs/estimate/0600ussl_1.html

Military, Education and Health Care are biggies, but the private sector is being crowded out of the last two, and the problems are only getting worse for them.

“That government is best which governs least”