The United Methodist Church that I have been attending for the past
couple of months has been going through the UMC’s Social Principles in
its Sunday School class. Last week, one of the people in the class was
talking about economics. We were in the section of the Social
Principles about “The Economic Community,” and economics is a subject of
interest for one of the regular attendants of the Sunday School class.
He has read a lot about the subject, and, essentially, he adheres to
the Austrian school of economics. He describes himself as a
libertarian, which means that there are two libertarians in the class.
I understood some of what he was saying, but not everything. He is
against the government borrowing a lot of money and creating money out
of thin air, since that leads to inflation. He is for personal savings
and thinks that even private citizens should be reluctant to go into
debt. He laments that Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable by gold,
and he believes that John F. Kennedy’s assassination may have related
to JFK challenging the Federal Reserve (see here).
He is critical of lowering interest rates, saying that interest rates
are a critical indicator of whether one should save or go into debt. He
also said that booms can lead to busts and that 2% economic growth a
year is sustainable.
The progressives in the group were not challenging what he was
saying, and I think that was because they identified with some of it.
He was criticizing the Iraq War and how that led to lots of debt because
the government preferred to go into debt to pay for it rather than to
collect a war tax. That would definitely resonate with progressives,
who think that the Iraq War was a bad idea. He was saying that there
are people with vested interests in the current economic system. That
resonated with a progressive in the group who opposes Citizens’ United,
even though the two of them may disagree on Citizens’ United. And he
was criticizing going into debt and not having enough savings, and I am
sure that a number of progressives can respect that as common-sense
wisdom—-when one can save and avoid debt, that is.
Often, critics of Austrian economics have maintained that inflation
right now is not much of a problem. Bruce Bartlett said more than once
during the Obama Presidency that all this money is out there but that
people are not spending much of it, and so the abundant money supply is
not contributing to inflation; rather, deflation is the problem.
Yesterday, I was watching a video by Robert Reich that was saying that the Federal Reserve should not raise interest rates (my friend Laurie discusses
the video on her political blog). Reich was saying that low interest
rates stimulate the economy and allow people to spend more money on
necessities rather than debt, and he also said that, overall, inflation
is currently not a problem. He said that high prices are a problem in
certain big companies where competition is lacking, but not overall. Reich was making this
point because the conventional economic wisdom has long been that there
is an inverse relationship between inflation and interest rates.
Indeed, according to this chart,
inflation is low. At the same time, I have difficulty saying that
inflation is not a problem. I know that, during the four years that I
was living in upstate New York, my Mom and her husband complained often
about the high prices of groceries, and how the prices continued to
rise. That was difficult for us, especially in a time when every single
dollar mattered. Now that we live in Washington and shop at a grocery
store that has low prices, that is not as much of a problem for us, and
there is a little more flexibility in our finances. But high prices
were a problem for us, for a long time.