Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

One of the stunning things that Lockdowns showed us was that the U.S. manufacturing capability & supply chain is very robust. Even with most of the nation not working, there was still enough excess capacity in reserve to quickly expand to fill the need, minimizing the time of shortages, real or manufactured, to at most a couple of months. However, we don’t have infinite flexibility, if people want to slide into even less productivity, America’s capacity can eventually be overwhelmed. Inflation occurs when production is less than consumption. Limiting consumption to production is difficult without keeping score, which is what money does but the unending stream of newly-printed money has removed that feedback mechanism, so something else less controllable will have to limit inflation: price controls don’t work, having been tried multiple times; in fact, any kind of gate-keeping causes more harm than good, otherwise command economies like Communist nations use would be the ideal. With 100 million Americans not working because they’re retired, and another 100 million who don’t want to work, there’s an obvious solution to increasing capacity, but laziness is a toughie to overcome, and incompetence is impossible.