One of the things that tripped me up about inflation when I first started thinking about it was, not the logic, but the mechanics of how the market adapts to money expansion.
Logically, it makes perfect sense that an economy containing 10 apples and $10 of money would price apples at $1 a piece, and if the money supply increased to $20 then the price of apples would double to $2 each.
Wealth is not the money, but the goods and services itself. The money merely acts as a liquidity key for entering and exiting the ownership of goods and services.
Mechanically, I wondered how the market, a totally decentralized system, would adapt to the increase of money, even as central planners attempted to decieve it.
It finally became clear to me when I thought of how old fashioned auction houses work: depending on current bids, the auctioneer will find the highest tolerable price for a good, period. The bidders would offer up those prices based on their own subjective value assessment of the good. If there are no bids that resulted in a profit, the good might not be sold at all. This is exactly how the market works.
Business are incentivized to sell their goods and services not only at a price greater than their costs to produce, but at the highest price the market will tolerate.
They do this by adjusting their prices according to buyer interest. If $10 of bids came in for their 10 annual apples last year, they would sell the apples for $1 a piece. If this year, twice as much money is bidding for the same apples, the business would raise prices to $2 an apple. This would afford the business owners the ability to expand and purchasr more things in their personal lives.
In this way, businesses compute the proper prices without needing direct knowledge of the money supply.
Businesses across the economy produce higher-order, specialized goods by using the inputs of businesses that produce lower-order, base goods.
If bids on energy, oil and electricity, double or triple as a result of a massive influx of government spending, then energy companies (like an auction house) will raise prices accordingly to equalize their scarce against an expanding money supply.
Since all other goods and services use energy as an input, their costs would rise, influencing their own price auction with their own customers
This process occurs at immense depth, all without knowledge of the actual money supply, to calculate the cost of higher order goods like iPhones and housing.
This seemingly impossible task, of allocating scarce resources across enormously complex economies, can only be accomplished decentrally because each business, being the only one with the key information about their production costs and their customer's subjective wants, can perform the auction process without any greater knowledge of the economy or money supply.
Thus, it becomes evident that (A) money printing cannot long influence the real cost of goods and services, (B) only serves to allow central planners to loot the economy, and (C) distorts the market of goods and services by filling it with unearned demand by parasites divorced from the needs of productive households.
#Bitcoin fixes this.
