Dismissing The Obvious

I had a brief but entertaining exchange a couple days ago, on a libertarian Facebook page. Another member posted a link to a Robert Reich piece that blamed inflation on corporate greed, with the semi-obligatory "I know most people on this page won't like this..."

I responded (of course - it's what I do) with:

- A massive amount of money was created in the last couple years.

- Milton (The Great Man) Friedman observed that "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon."

- Walmart and Kroger (the two named culprits) only have about 1/3 of the US grocery market share - hardly a duopoly.

- If corporate greed could happen in this fashion, why would they have waited for decades to start?

- It's not cool or clever to trot out some cockamamie alternate theory in the face of the obvious.

Or, something like that. When I checked into Facebook later in the day, I saw a reply about supply chains, to which I started retorting with "inflation is simple - too much money chasing too few goods. The government created great giant gobs of new money - why would we be surprised by inflation?"

Or something like that.

When I hit "post," I got an error message. Apparently, the OP chickened out. He deleted... not his reply to me, but the whole post.

Needless to say, that tickled me.

So, I am relying on memory for this retelling. Which posits (no, it doesn’t beg) the question - if a Facebook conversation disappears, did it ever happen?

Nevertheless…

I'd like to think I enlightened him with my razor-sharp rhetoric, but let's not get carried away - far more likely he wanted to drive-by his contrarian wisdom without defending it, and balked at simply letting me (and others) have the last word on the topic.

As for inflation, well, it's here, and it's ugly, and its cause is obvious. Sometimes, the answer really is the simple and obvious one. Sometimes, 2+2=4. There no Crackerjack box prize for being the "cool kid" who contorts some "cleverer than thee" alternate explanation. If you go, "but wait! If we were talking vectors, then 2+2 could equal less than 4," most people would prefer to smack you upside the head than applaud your audacity.

While it is true that inflation is a bit more complicated than 2+2, and there is room for discussion about additional drivers, here we should apply the Sagan Standard: Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence. If you want to assert that the current inflation is not the product of excessive money printing and government spending, you're gonna need more than a partisan hack (or an appropriative harridan) blaming corporate greed. Reich has every reason to make up BS - his preferred party is facing an epic shellacking at the polls in November, that party is not going to change its ways in order to tame inflation, so the unwashed masses need to be offered a twisted tale of misdeeds by the hated rich, to divert their wrath away from the Democrats.

After all, it's better to believe and regurgitate some "smarter-than-you" type than that which is obvious. Right?