Look at all the great stuff we lost because of inflation scare-talk

We swapped pandemic aid, new spending and minimum wage hikes for wage suppression and mass layoffs.

Tonight (May 5), I’ll be at the Books, Inc in Mountain View with Mitch Kapor for my novel Red Team Blues; and this weekend (May 6/7), I’ll be in Berkeley at the Bay Area Bookfest.

Call me a conspiratorialist if you must. But when CEOs get on earnings calls and brag about how covid, war, and scare-stories about inflation let them hike their prices and rake in never-before-seen profit margins, I think it’s reasonable to blame inflation on greed, not on workers getting a couple of relief checks during the lockdown.

Amazingly, this is a controversial position! For more than a year, Very Serious People have dismissed the greedflation hypothesis — that CEOs aren’t lying when they boast about using pretexts to hike prices — is a conspiracy theory used to dupe people who Just Don’t Understand Economics.

Jeff Bezos — whose profits soared during the lockdowns, even as his workers sickened and died in droves — went on a Twitter tear last March to tell us that free gubmint money (for workers, that is) was causing inflation: