If we operated on a deflationary currency, the value of your labour would be tied to cost of goods, and your salary would decrease each year, while the rich continued to accumulate more of the proportion of cash. Working people would still have to spend most of their income on survival, while the rich would be free to sit on piles of deflationary currency and become even richer.
In an inflationary currency, the rich invest in assets that aren't affected by inflation. Inflation is not the problem in this scenario. Hoarding wealth is. This would be increased with a deflationary currency.
I think this is just propaganda that you've accepted. You think it's bad if things get cheaper? And you think people would just sit there while their employer decreases their wages every year? Not going to happen. Also, we already get wage decreases each year because of inflation. If you don't get a significant raise every single year you're losing purchasing power. And even then, you have to wait a whole year. The fact that people don't realize this is already happening is part of the scam.
> I think this is just propaganda that you've accepted.
It's just logical inference. Your point of view shallowly considers everyone as consumers without thinking about the fact that if "things get cheaper", that means that labour has also gotten cheaper. You assert that people won't "sit there" while employers reduce their wages, but that's exactly what would HAVE to happen in this system. Otherwise the company would go under because their product or service gets cheaper each year, but labour stays the same or increases in cost. Especially under capitalism which demands constant growth.
It simply would not make sense to pay someone the same price for a bushel of wheat when the cost of bread has reduced to a fraction of its original price. I don't know why you say that it is propaganda to acknowledge this extremely simple logical inference.
In a healthy economy, deflation (i.e. falling prices) is a good thing. Things get cheaper over time - it's the utopia we should be living in now.
We've made massive increases in production efficiency across the board over the years, but the banks and government have creamed off all those efficiency gains for themselves, by printing money, creating the illusion that everything is instead going up in value, and have made themselves mind-blowingly powerful.
As the world economies are so broken, if the money supply went down instead of up (i.e. deflationary supply), the real value of the already enormous debts would increase even if the nominal value didn't, causing the economies to collapse suddenly. By keeping the money supply increasing, the economies are collapsing slowly instead, ultimately ending in hyperinflation.
If the real costs is decreasing that's usually good, a decrease in nominal prices not so much. Why would you invest into increasing productivity etc. if you know that you revenue will only go down Longterm? Generally we'd want to quality to increase while prices stay more or less the same to encourage innovation.
> We've made massive increases in production efficiency
Likely much if not most of that wouldn't have happened if monetary supply was constrained and there would have been a lot less investment.
> the real value of the already enormous debts would increase even if the nominal value didn't
Why would you even want that to happen? I mean that was a pretty common situation in the 19th century and generally and it was pretty horrible. Imagine if you were a farmer who had a mortgage and the price of the goods you were selling kept going down every year... OTH other hand you could just buy government bonds and spend your days not doing anything useful (e.g. if you were an English aristocrat on a fixed income).
> By keeping the money supply increasing, the economies are collapsing slowly instead
Except they are not collapsing. What we have now is generally a huge improvement over the permanent boom and bust cycles that kept happening until the 1930s in large part because the money supply was constrained and increased at a slower pace than the economy was growing.
Deflation is not a healthy system under capitalism, where people must work to survive. In the ideal scenario the value of work would approach zero due to a reduction of money in circulation. Work done yesterday would always be worth more than work done today and generational wealth would eventually become necessary to not be locked in servitude to the wealthy.
How can the value of work ever approach zero? Human work is value.
The value of anything simply derives from the quantity and quality (demand/supply) of the human work that goes into producing it.
In the current inflationary system, people are working for something that the banking system produces for almost nothing i.e. in the eyes of the banks/government, they are working for almost free.
> How can the value of work ever approach zero? Human work is value.
It would never reach zero, it would keep approaching zero though (relative to the amount of money of people who earnt it before you).
Basically, someone could just hoard the cash they have at 0% risk and still get richer than you over time even if you manage to save 100% of your salary. How is that a reasonable system that encourages growth in productivity?
Of course we have bonds but when real interest rates are close to zero than doesn't work that well like in a deflationary system e.g. throughout much of the 1800s yields were 4-5% and deflation was basically the standard outside of major wars since the economy was growing faster than the supply of money was, so basically you could just not do anything productive with your wealth and still do fine, that's basically how British aristocrats from all the novels (and similar parasitical classes) sustained their lifestyles while not providing anything useful in return to the working classes whose taxes and severely depressed incomes made this whole thing possible).
This isn't true historically. In ancient times, a day's labor was the unit of currency. A "talent" in the Bible, for example, is a unit of metal representative of a day's wages.
