This afternoon my bro Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider posted an article he apparently wrote in high school titled "Why Deflation Is In Fact Really, Really Bad". It's basically a rewrite of Paul Krugman's NY Times article, "Why Is Deflation Bad?" These two really know how to create catchy, sophisticated titles. It's like a competition between the two of them.
The basic assumption of Krugenthal's argument is that if our credit-based, consumer-oriented economy isn't continually growing (inflating) then we would be forced to consider that there might be an alternative to the insane system that we've all grown up with, that working like a slave to buy crap that we don't need and pay taxes for wars and government agencies that we don't believe in is in reality an incredibly stupid fucking way to spend one's limited time on this planet.
I for one cannot wait for the deflation to achieve escape velocity. The rent's too damn high; the police state that we pay for is too out of control, and nothing would solve problems like these faster than a deflationary economic spiral that cuts funding and demand and whatever else needs to be pruned from the tree of life.
Krugenthal mentions the phrase "downward spiral" in his article, and that gives me hope. It's a tiny acknowledgement that nature is cyclical, spiral and fractal, and that putzs with PhD's like Bernanke may know how to brown-nose authority figures but they don't know shit about what the world and we the people are really like.
