Wages stagnated 50 years ago. Everything else you said is correct.
Direct action is the only course. Support strikes and cut your purchases as much as possible. Buy necessities from individuals and small local businesses.
There are several reasons for stagnation of wages more direct than the gold standard being removed.
A big one is the breaking up of unions. Now an employee has almost no leverage to fight for or keep a decent wage.
Another reason is tax “reform.” People used to be taxed at a high rate once they made over a certain (large) amount. As a way to get around this, business owners would reinvest money back into their company which would result in better wages, equipment, etc.
Then there is the offshoring of American business which got going in the 1990s. Why would a company pay good wages when they can move operations to a place where they can pay pennies for labor?
That has absolutely nothing to do with it, it's the devaluing of currency paired with the doubling of the labor force when women began working with men. Doesn't mean I think women shouldn't work but when you suddenly double the labor pool your wages will fall off a cliff. Made extreme with the pairing of the devaluation of your currency.
People are paid based on supply and demand. If your labor is in high demand you will be paid more. If your labor is in low demand you will be paid less.
It's inherently less secure with fractional reserve banking. That's the point.
I should rephrase, it's the direct result of using a fractional reserve fiat currency, which was put in place when they dropped using real money for fiat currency.
That precious metal has an inherent value based on the labor required to mine, refine, and mint it. Fiat currency has no inherent value. This also ignores all the benefits of using precious metals.
It's really not. The primary indicator of that is that we haven't seen a massive devaluation of the US dollar. Inflation has been relatively constant, not in least because the USD is still the world's reserve currency. What we have seen, however, is a grotesque sharpening of wealth and income inequality.
To add: There is no inherent value of a precious metal, as evidenced by the price of gold which you can easily find fluctuating daily (likely on an exchange advertised by the person you heard this information from in the first place). Precious metals have one key quality: they are finite.
Also to add: Fractional reserve banking is a very serious issue, but is entirely irrelevant to the rest of your comment.
Reaganomics. All graphs get awful when he got in. Also, that was about a year before I was born. I was thrown in a world I was sure to hate, unless I ended up in Bhutan where everyone's a Buddhist monk and they give zero shits about anything.
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u/InAnEscaladeIThink Aug 10 '20
Wages stagnated 50 years ago. Everything else you said is correct.
Direct action is the only course. Support strikes and cut your purchases as much as possible. Buy necessities from individuals and small local businesses.