If you really worry about inflation you can buy TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities) and keep your money inflation-invariant.

The 2-3% inflation target is not there to mess with people who already earned money: they have lots of inflation-neutral opportunities to invest their monies and they always had them. (If you are keeping your dollars under the mattress you are an idiot and the long-term effects of inflation should be the least of your worries.)

Inflation is there to avoid deflation which is a nasty condition that is a lot harder to get rid of than higher-than-usual inflation. (because during deflation the central bank has no power to influence the monetary base via setting rates: nobody is going to put money into the bank at a negative interest rate ...)

So the zero bound (0% interest rate) is the dangerous blade of the sword, and the Fed is trying to keep a 2-3% inflation target to not hit that blade, so to speak.

The central bank is unable to control the situation mostly because the US economy is in a liquidity trap, which is a special condition where the economy contracts so quickly that the central bank setting rates to 0% does not avoid deflation and where the central bank "printing money" does not drive up rates because that money does not flow into the real economy.

So the economy goes into a stalemate and experiences a long period of deflation and suffering as a result.

Japan has spent two decades in such a liquidity trap and it's not pretty.

The Chicago school (and other freshwater economists) cannot acknowledge that fact because they spent half a century arguing that such a thing is impossible, so they are coming up with excuses about how it's "structural unemployment" or "missing confidence" or the "bond vigilantes". Them acknowledging a liquidity trap and in general acknowledging that new keynesian economics describes reality while their neoclassical model does not would be equal to Microsoft dropping Windows and using Linux instead: ain't gonna happen.

You are missing two historic facts.

Firstly, inflation was not flat: look at the graph, you can see the business cycles playing out: inflation went up during growth periods and there was deflation and very high unemployment in busts like the Panic of 1893, which was triggered by bank failures that snowballed into a full-blown banking crisis that quickly crashed the stock market and then spilled over into the real economy and caused a real depression that lasted several years with peak unemployment of 14%:

Secondly, you are missing the historic fact that in the 18th century US there was a form of inflation not measured via the price level in dollars: the inflation of the gold monetary base in the 18th century, via mining 60 metric tons of new physical gold per year on average.

That gold is a small amount today compared to the size of the highly sophisticated US economy of 300+ million people, but in 1820 there were only about 10 million people in the US so new gold mined amounted to a significant portion of the GDP and it also provided a constant influx of "new money" increasing the effective monetary base, printed out of thin air - erm, printed out of hard rock formations. This free liquidity provided fluid investments and relatively easy credit.

Once the "gold simulus" ended, near the end of the 18th century, when the economy became much bigger for gold mining to have an effect, the negative effects of deflation started causing real bad depressions (see the link above - there were several other crashes in the "gilded age" era): people valued hoarding money over production and this started a positive feedback loop of contraction, which took years to recover from in most of the cases.

So historic facts are not very sympathetic to your hard money arguments I'm afraid. Today returning to the gold standard would be like basing an economy on bitcoins: economic suicide.

Economies want to grow, population wants to grow and people want to produce more value - those kinds of dynamics are not compatible with the concept of a rigid, static amount of gold representing money. Why should money not grow together with the size of the economy?

There's more than 50 countries in Africa, most of the poor and under-developed ones have a very low government expenditure index. I said "most" and I stand by that qualifier, if you check the list you'll see that most African countries spend less than 40% on offering civilization to their citizens.

No, if you read my post you will see that I listed the advantages that those European countries have over the US - those which spend even more on public expenditures than the US.

Citizens of those countries generally get more bang for the buck, obviously.

I replied to the point made about today's Africa. If you want to argue about how the US was 100 years ago then we can certainly do that but it obviously cannot be compared to today's situation directly.

Corporations don't "hate" anything - they are legal entities representing a group of people.

By that argument nazis would also be a much larger part of existing parties as historically owners and executives of corporations certainly liked nazi ideologies, as it was hugely profitable to them.

So that argument of yours fails too. I think you are failing to consider the fact that there can be many other reasons as well why a given ideology is not main-stream, beyond them not being corporate-friendly.

If we go back to the 1910 example, Rockefeller's company (Standard Oil) cornered many strategic US markets with little to no government help and centrally planned vast portions of the US economy for decades, right from his mansion. There was no free market where Standard Oil was present: either you "partnered" with them, giving them much of your profits, or you were driven out of the market by being price-dumped and by rail companies (also controlled by Rockefeller) refusing to transport your products.

Rockefeller was a non-elected plutocrat. Is that the kind of free-market future you envision for the US? If yes then I disagree. If not then please explain how monopolies will be avoided.

I just pointed out a false statement and mentioned a few facts - that is not an ideology, unless you consider "truth" an ideology.

You have not actually countered any of the grandparent and the great-grandparent post's points, so why do you want to mark it +5 Funny? The CPI graph you posted confirms their points.

It's a historic fact that deflation is hurting productive investments big time while rewarding unproductive money hoarders, while moderate inflation (emphasis on moderate) helps grow civilization. What facts can you offer against that?

FYI, that's a false statement, most African nations spend much less than 40% of their GDP on providing civilization to their citizens: Burkina Faso (21.6%), Cameroon (18.5%), Côte d'Ivoire (19.7%) - you name it.

The countries you wanted to compare the US with is Germany (43.7%), Finland (49.5%) or Sweden (52.5%).

What does that spending buy their citizens: universal health-care for all citizens, as a birthright. High quality public education that almost all eduction happens in public schools and universities. Well-developed public transportation systems shipping children to school which transportation system I'm sure you'd enjoy as a tourist as well. Pervasive unemployment insurance and various protections for job-takers and their families: no hire-and-fire. Compare German unemployment during the crisis with US unemployment and guess which one spends more of its GDP on common good services for its citizens?

And you want the US to move to the same level of civilization as Burkina Faso or Côte d'Ivoire? Corporate donors will love it but good luck selling that to your fellow citizens ...

Correct.

Also, the grandparent misses the fact that a lot of the costs are not only linear but superlinear: the baby boomers are retiring and the world did not become more peaceful.

What it is certainly not is what he claimed, i.e. a shrinking proportion of the whole pie:

And this is the false claim I took issue with. With more people you cannot lower the burden on all, as more people means more costs and shifting demographics (people getting older) it means even more costs.

That claim is false: the overwhelming majority of US government spending is proportional to the number of people - and in particular, a significant chunk of it is proportional to the number of old US citizens.

Think of the US government as an insurance company for the old, which has an army. That single sentence describes roughly 50% of all US government spending.

Much of the rest pays for equal-chance education (teachers), unemployment insurance (which cost goes up during crises and goes down during booms), poor families/children, roads and other infrastructure - none of those have fixed maintenance costs but go up linearly with the number of people.

So an income proportional tax rate which gets progressively larger for the luckier (richer) people is a very natural model if you think about it rationally: those should pay for civilization who benefit from it financially.

But that does not prove your point - sulphur oxide pollution is just a very small part of what cars emit: CO2 is the main greenhouse gas that cars emit, and US cars emit several orders of magnitude more CO2 than just 15 container ships ...

Nice trolling in any case.

That's a reasonable observation but this would bring an end to almost all lawsuits in the US, not just patent suits: the fact that an attacked party must still pay legal costs (and has to do that for years at times), even if he wins the lawsuit, is a form of unreasonable seizure in itself.

The judicial system is not about fairness, it's about applying the rule of law. If you want our laws to represent (your version of) fairness, talk to your fellow citizens and make sure that the congressman you elect represents you.

I don't think we disagree about executives.

A good executive, while not having expert knowledge in every field he supervises, will have a much better idea about what his limitations are, and he won't "simplify" the world and believe that this simplified model is reality .

Instead he'll use a simplified model to make decisions, in full knowledge of the risks that this brings with it. He'll trust good experts around him to tell him when he messes up - but he won't (and can't) expect the experts to be able to produce (nearly) the same rate of average-to-good decisions that he can do.

A good executive will also generally have pretty good emotional intelligence - there's many forms of intelligence and not all are well recognized.

So an executive is in stark contrast to what the general population does when it comes to understanding the world and making decisions.

Also, did you mean to suggest that I insulted someone with my last paragraph? I think it's a factual statement and it's not really shaped (or intended) as an insult.

This is a civil case not a criminal case, there's no presumption of innocence.

Btw., his motivation is probably financial: he wrote bits of the Linux kernel networking stack and for years he not written any new code but has been suing companies via GPL violation lawsuits, which is probably a very lucrative business.

If Google is not using his specific code he perhaps sees Android as taking away his standing to sue, and hence it takes away his livelihood. It is in his direct financial interest to see Android go down.

Just speculating.

He mentioned the prediction in his post: a Quebec type event every 10 years (a week of blackout coupled with a few hundred deaths) and a 1859 type event every 100 years (a month long blackout coupled with tens of thousands of deaths and after-effects for years (in addition to a big recession)).

Do you need a specific date and precise position for landfall to convince you that it's worth protecting your house in a hurricane affected area, or are past precedents enough for you to protect yourself pro-actively?

The current expansion of the universe is faster than the speed of light.

Distances between the out-most galaxies at opposite ends of the universe is growing faster than the speed of light and current models suggest that this process is accelerating.

Some quick (and hopefully not totally bogus!) back of the envelope calculations: the latest value for the Hubble constant is 71 km/sec (with about 5% of accuracy), which means 71 km/sec expansion of the universe, per megaparsec of space. Given that the current size of the universe is about 28,000 psec, this means that the universe is expanding about 2 million kilometers per second. That's moving opposite boundaries away from each other more than 6 times faster than the speed of light. (which is 0.3 million kilometers per second)

That does not mean that any physical matter can move faster than the speed of light, sadly.