더구나 가격 인덱스로 인해 다양한 집단의, 가격의 상대적 위치와 변화가 오히려 감춰지고 만다.
따라서 각국의 정부가 목표로 삼는 2%의 인플레 정책은 실제로 존재하는 무엇을 겨냥한 것이 아닌, 경제 통계학자의 자의적인 구성물이다.
Austrian Monetary Theory vs. Federal Reserve Inflation Targeting
•Richard M. Ebeling
One of the leading policy guideposts for central banks and many monetary policy proponents nowadays is the idea of “inflation targeting.” Several major central banks around the world, including the Federal Reserve in the United States, have set a goal of two percent price inflation. The problem is, what central bankers are targeting is a phantom that does not exist.
Individuals, Relative Prices, and Changes in the Value of Money
If individuals find themselves, for some reason, with greater amounts of money in their possession, and therefore with larger cash balances of money than they find it attractive and advantageous (at the margin) to hold in comparison to other goods they could possess, they will spend these “excess” cash balances in the marketplace for those other desired goods. Given the available supplies of those purchasable goods and services, the greater sums of money offered in trade for them will tend, over time, all other things held given, to push up their prices, as people competitively bid against each other to purchase them with those extra amounts of money offered for them. Thus, there occurs, over time, a general rise in the scale of prices in the economy as a whole.
But the particular contribution of Ludwig von Mises and a number of other Austrian economists has been to emphasize that changes in the quantity of money in the market does not bring about a general rise in prices either simultaneously or proportionally. Any changes in the quantity of money always appears in some particular point in the market, and finds its way into the hands of particular individuals. As Mises expressed it Monetary Stabilization and Cyclical Policy (1928):
If the quantity of money increases, the additional new quantity of money must necessarily flow first of all into the hands of certain definite individuals – gold producers, for example, or, in the case of paper money inflation, the coffers of the government. It changes only their incomes and fortunes at first and, consequently, only their value judgments. Not all goods go up in price in the beginning, but only those goods that are demanded by these first beneficiaries of the inflation. Only later are prices of the remaining goods raised, as the increased quantity of money progresses step by step throughout the land and eventually reaches every participant in the economy.
But even then, when finally the upheaval of prices due to the new quantity of money has ended, the prices of all goods and services will not have increased to the same extent. Precisely because the price increases have not affected all commodities at one time, shifts in the relationships in wealth and income are effected which affect the supply and demand of individual goods and services differently. Thus, these shifts must lead to a new orientation of the market and of market prices.
From this “Austrian” perspective, therefore, focusing attention on changes in the general “price level” of goods and services hides from view an appreciation and understanding of all the relative price and wage changes and shifts in the allocation of resources and the distribution of income that is the inescapable essence of the “dynamics” of monetary changes within the market economy.
Indeed, any resulting change in the general purchasing power or value of money as reflected in some calculated or measured “general price level” or “rate” of general price inflation is only the cumulative outcome of all the individual price changes that have brought about a rise of one price or group of prices after another in a particular temporal sequence. There cannot be a general rise in prices independent of and separate from these individual relative price and wage changes in whatever pattern they may follow through time based upon the particular “injection” point from which an increase in the money supply had been introduced into the economy.
The reason for this, of course, being that it is only individuals who experience an increase in their available money balances, who undertake new and additional purchases on particular goods and services reflecting their tastes, preferences, and investment decisions concerning on what to spend this increase in the money supply that has come their way.
Price Deflation, Price Level Stabilization, and the Great Depression
First Ludwig von Mises and then Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992) in, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1929) and Prices and Production (1932) demonstrated that it is when increases in the supply of money and credit are introduced through the banking system by an “activist” monetary policy of a central bank, that it may set in motion the boom and bust of the business cycle.
The particular insight, especially in Hayek’s writings at this time, was to demonstrate that even a monetary policy that only increases the money supply sufficiently to maintain a “stable price level” in what would otherwise be a period of “deflationary” falling prices still brings about an potential imbalance between savings and investment due to manipulations of market interest rates.
Indeed, if prices, one after another, are generally declining due to economic progress – increases in industrial productivity, new or improved cost efficient methods of production – that enables more and better goods to be offered at lower prices to the benefit of the general consuming public, then this should be considered a “good deflation.” Any increases in the money supply to counteract such a price deflation may not only thwart it but also end up generating economic distortions and imbalances that may require a period of wrenching readjustment when a monetary-created boom turns into an economic bust.
This was the “Austrian” explanation for the causes of the Great Depression, since through a good part of the 1920s, the U.S. Federal Reserve had attempted to maintain a fairly stable price level through monetary expansion in the face of economy-wide cost efficiencies and manufacturing improvements that Hayek and other Austrians were defining precisely as an instance of such a “benign deflation.” As Hayek explained in 1932:
Instead of prices being allowed to fall slowly [in the 1920s], such volumes of additional credit were pumped into circulation [by the Federal Reserve] that the level of prices were roughly stabilized . . .Whether such inflation merely serves to keep prices stable, or whether it leads to an increase in prices, makes little difference. Experience has now confirmed . . . that such inflation can also lead to production being misdirected to such an extent that, in the end, a breakdown in the form of a crisis becomes inevitable.”
(See my eBook, Monetary Central Planning and the State [2015].)
Arbitrary Construction and Limited Relevance in Price Indexes
In addition, however, is the issue of what is the “price level” and rates of changes in it that central banks choose to track and target to aim at a general two percent rate of annual price inflation? To know if prices, in general, are rising or falling, it is necessary to have some benchmark from which any percentage change is being measured. For this purpose, for more than a good century and a half, economists and statisticians have devised “index numbers” to determine changes in the “price level”.
A “basket of goods” is constructed by selecting a variety of commodities that are then “weighted” in terms of the relative amount of expenditures devoted to them out of a given income. The “basket” is then tracked through time to determine and calculate by how much this basket then costs – more, less, or the same – at some point in the future in comparison to the benchmark starting year from which the estimate is being made.
But by what standard and by whom is the “basket” being constructed? The most common one heard in the news is the Consumer Price Index (CPI). But there also is the “Core” Price Index (the CPI minus food and energy prices), the Producer Price Index, the Wholesale Price Index, a “fixed” or “chain weighted” price index, a national price index vs. regional price indices. The list goes on, with some of these price indices constructed by government agencies and others by private research institutes.
The fact there is no “objectively” right or wrong index to have a “correct” measurement of prices and any movements in them over time. It all depends upon the purpose behind the index’s construction and its use. Furthermore, there is an inescapable arbitrariness in an index’s composition. Someone has to decide which goods and their particular prices are the relevant and representative ones; someone has to decide the relative “weights” to assign to each of the goods or services included in the “basket.” And there must be judgments to ignore or downplay that during the time period over which the price index is being tracked, numerous changes may occur that undermine the constancy and reliability of the components contained within it.
While the general value or purchasing power of money is made up of the multitude of individual price ratios between money and each of the goods against which it trades, the relevance and significance of any of those money prices for individuals in the marketplace depends upon the actual goods and the relative amounts a consumer purchases, and the particular production inputs and their amounts a specific manufacturer or producer or seller utilizes in his business. Plus the goods and their relative amounts purchased in these individual consumer and firm-level circumstances change over time with changing circumstances, including the relative prices among the good used for different purposes. (See my article, “The CPI is a False Guide for Monetary Policy”.)
The Price Level vs. Relative Prices in the Business Cycle
Gottfried Haberler (1900-1995), an active member of the Austrian School in the 1920s and 1930s, pointed out, for instance, in 1928:
The general price level is not a given, self-evident fact, but a theoretical abstraction. It is a scientific tool that has to serve for certain scientific and practical purposes, such as comparison of real income, establishment of a standard for deferred payments, guidance for monetary policy. It is often tacitly assumed that there is only one price level which serves all those purposes . . . This assumption is, however, erroneous . . . For each purpose a separate concept of a price level must be established. An economically relevant definition of price level cannot be independent of the purpose in mind.
And Haberler further emphasized that any such economy-wide price index used as a guide for monetary policy hides from view all of the actual market relationships between and among goods as actually reflected in the structure of relative prices and wages throughout the processes of production:
It is undeniable that business activity in each several branch depends primarily on a few prices – on the relation of the prices of raw material, its machinery equipment, and labor on the one hand, and the prices of its products on the other. This has, however, obviously nothing to do with a general price index, for in an index exactly those features of the behavior of prices disappear which are relevant [for understanding the business cycle]. The relative position and change of different groups of prices are not revealed but are hidden and submerged in a general index.
Thus, when the U.S. Federal Reserve or any other central bank around the world sets, for instance, a two percent price inflation target as a guide for monetary policy, it is targeting something that does not really exist “out there,” but is the arbitrary construction of economic statisticians who have decided some things are more relevant than others, with a wide variety of subsidiary assumptions that cloud the fact that there is nothing determinate or constant in which they are tracking. And that what is “meaningful” for the monetary policy maker may have little or nothing to do with what is meaningful and relevant in terms of prices and expenditures, standards of living or profitabilities in production, for the actual consumers and producers in the various corners of the marketplace.
Finally, the central banker’s very focus on a general economy-wide price index for pursuing a policy that is presumed to assist in maintaining stability, balance and growth in the market as a whole, hides from view the very distortions, imbalances, and misdirection of resources, labor and capital that their own monetary policy brings about due to how any and all monetary changes upset and twist the structure of relative prices, wages and input uses upon which a healthy market-oriented economy is ultimately dependent. (발췌)
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하이에크, 136쪽,
의지의 자유란 다른 사람이 아닌, 자신의 의지로 행동한다는 뜻이다. 모종의 요인에 의해 행동이 결정될 때, 그것이 진정한 자유가 아니라는 말은 근거가 없다.
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좌파들과의 논쟁에서 이기는 사람들은 인종차별주의자, 동성애 혐오자, 파시스트, 나치, 히틀러, 또라이, 이슬람 혐오자, 여성 혐오자가 되고 만다.
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지금 한국을 움직이는 사람은 문죄인이 아니다. 지금 서울에는 북한에서 내려온 북로당 거물이 모처에 숨어서, 한국의 정치를 좌우하고 있다.
중국의 모택동이 국공합작 이후로 일본과 싸우지는 않고, 농촌에서 공산주의 세력을 넓힌 다음에, 나중에는 장개석을 패퇴시켰듯이, 지금 종북좌파들은 전국의 골목으로 그들의 선전선동가들을 파견해서, 열심히 적화 사업에 열중하도록 하고 있다.
그 작업이 다 끝나면 다음으로 대한민국의 공식적인 적화 통일이 선언된다.
지금 당장 우파들이 목숨을 걸고 나아가 싸우지 않으면, 다음 기회란 찾아오지 않는다.
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변희재(pyei****)
뭐, 처음부터, 박대통령 잡기 위해, 재판 다 결론 내려놨던 것이니, 예상이 되었지만, K재단, 미르 재단 출자액이 뇌물죄무죄 나온 것은 나름 의미가 있는 겁니다.
탄핵의 첫 단추는 이것으로 꿰어졌던 건데, 이게 풀린 셈이기 때문입니다.
물론 재판부는 재단 관련 "박대통령과 최순실의 사익을 위해 만들어졌다"는 불필요한 첨언을 넣었기 때문에, 강요죄 명분을 만들었지만, 뇌물죄가 무죄가 되면서, 뇌물 수수액이 78억으로 대폭 줄어든 겁니다.
이제, 엄밀히 말하면 박대통령과 최순실이 경제공동체가 아니라는 점, 박대통령이 승마 전체 지원을 요구했지, 최순실과 정유라 챙기라고 요구한 적 없다는 점만 항변하면 되는, 구도가 좀 단순해진 거지요.
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우파 방관자들
근세 중국이 망해갈 때 중국의 지식계급 들이 나라가 망해가는 것을 보고도 방관만 하고 있는 것을 보고 사상가 양계초(梁啓超)가 그의 문집 에서 방관하는 지식계급을 여섯 부류로 구분해서 "방관자를 꾸짖노라!"라는 제목으로 설파한 글로서 그 내용을 요약 해본다.
1. 혼돈파(混沌派) : 마땅히 자기들이 해야 할일을 모르는 배운 무식꾼(the leaned ignorant)의 무리, 끓기 직전의 냄비 물에서도 봄날의 따스함을 느끼는 물고기 신세, 불붙은 제비집 안의 제비가 날이 밝은 줄로 아는 것 같은 혼돈파, 세상물정 모르고 교과서만 외운다.
2. 위아파(爲我派) : 벼락이 떨어져도 들고 갈 짐만을 꾸리는 무리들, 나라가 망해도 나만 살면 된다는 자들, 옳고 그름보다 단기적 손익계산에 밝은 먹물들이 爲我派.
3. 오호파(嗚呼派) : 한탄과 한숨 만 쉬고 통곡만 하는 자들, 입으로만 모든 일 하는 자 들, 실천력, 행동, 추진력, 용기가 부족한 나약한 지식인 부류
4. 소매파(笑罵派) : 남의 등 뒤에서 냉소, 욕설, 비평만 하는 자들, 대안 없는 비판, 비판을 위한 비판과 놀부 심뽀로 조롱하는 笑罵派.
5. 포기파(抛棄派) : 자포자기를 하는 자들, 남에게는 기대를 걸면서 자기는 아무것도 할 수 없는 자라고 생각하는 자들, “내가 나서지 않아도 누군가가 하겠지”라고 변방을 맴도는 방관 지식인의 부류
6. 대시파(待時派) : 항상 때가 안 됐다고 이유를 대며 방관하는 무리들, 위선자들로서 방관자들 중 가장 간교한 먹물들이 待時派이다.
나라가 망해가는데 우파 지식인들은 여섯 부류의 방관자들만 득실거린다.
출처: 일베, 필자: 햇불이보수가
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