So you'll avoid hyperinflation by engaging in the very herd-behaviour patterns that cause it?
The herd will be getting t-shirts and bed sheets, not thinking through the implications. But if it's raining money, then money will be useless very shortly. In this instance, it is in my personal best interest to have my assets in something that isn't currency. It's not converting it to land/gold/stocks/whatever that would be causing hyperinflation here. It's the fact that there's a sudden oversupply of money.
I hear arguments all the time of the form "$x/bbl oil will make energy technology x economically viable.", as though there would be capacity in an economy to re-equip its industry at a time when the vast majority of its people cannot obtain food or fuel and their homes are underwater. That doesn't work at all.
It is, in fact, a great argument for Keynesian economics. Things like windmills, solar, and nuclear plants become more and more economically viable as the price of fossil fuels rise. All the more so when the externalities are included in the price. In this situation, there is an oversupply of labor combined with an undersupply of capital. Running up government deficits to solve both problems may sound like a suicide plan, but does anybody have a better idea?
Unfortunately economics today is a counterproductive pseudoscience that compromises people's critical faculties . . .
Nonsense. Economics has ideas like "externalities" that tell you that not only is government intervention not evil, but is often necessary. Even Austrian economists do not ignore this point--they just give different suggestions on how to fix it.
Economists actually have thought out these problems. Too often, their advice gets passed off as either socialism or corporate whoring.
