Inflation

Inflation is a term that means different things to different people. To an economist, inflation is expansion of the money supply through the printing of money. To a politician, inflation is something that is out of their control, not their responsibility, and, therefore, not their fault. To the average person, however, inflation is the situation where the price of everything is going up, except their salary. There are many reasons why inflation occurs, and we should go over them briefly.

First, inflation can be caused by events out our collective control. This could happen if every ski resort in the world had zero snow, except for Whistler, causing a bidding war on the prices of hotels and lift tickets there. In this scenario, a supply shortage was caused by random events, or acts of God. In this case, we must give credit where credit is due, and concede, albeit begrudgingly, that the politician can, from time to time, be correct in stating that inflation is not always their fault.

There are, however, cases where such supply shortages can be directly caused by governments which regulate an industry to death, even if they do so imperceptibly slowly over time. A perfect example of this is with housing, where the amount of drawings, and inspections, and fines, and redesigns, and soil tests and so on near double the cost of development. A less obvious example is with all businesses in general where they must pay several thousand dollars to an accountant each year, just to partake in the pleasure of further paying the government in taxes.

Another case where inflation could occur is with the situation where you pay for something, but that money is stolen, so you have to pay for it again. We often see this happening in old, slap stick comedies where the customer is distracted and then convinced they never paid to begin with, but when it happens in our governments, we call this fraud. Former Chestermere mayor, Jeff Colvin, blew the whistle on kickbacks, where tax payer money was being paid out to builders and administrators, which he characterized as the biggest driver of inflation.

Finally, inflation can be caused by the most difficult to grasp scheme, the printing of money. There are three principle ways this can happen. First, money can be printed and evenly distributed to all citizens of a country, but this has most likely never happened in the history of money. Second, the central bank can lower the interest rate, either directly or indirectly through 'quantitative easing'. When they do this, people who have a some money or a few properties to use as collateral, can go take out a million dollar loan, buy a million dollar appartment, and use the rent to cover the interest payments. For this reason, low interest rates lead to an over heated property market. Third, and lastly, the government can just borrow money and give it to others to spend. This is what happened during Covid, and the interest payments on this borrowed money are what have made us markedly poorer.

The reason Canadians are miserable, and the reason that we have no industry, and the reason we have such high property prices, is in part due to the fact that we have rampant inflation which is introducing uncertainty into our lives. We either need to peg the Canadian dollar to a stable commodity, like gold, silver, or perhaps BTC, or we need to get the government out of the business of currency altogether and let the market fulfil that need. Or better yet, both. We must not give those with the discretion to spend money, the power to print money.