> The ultimate demand of anti-inflationists is that your salary remain $X - forever, the cost of a car remains $Y - forever, and the cost of a loaf of bread remains $Z - forever.
I don't want prices to stay still; that is unrealistic (and inadvisable) in a dynamic, adaptable system.
I want prices to trend downwards more than salaries. I know this is possible because it happens to computer hardware, adjusting for performance. Why does it not happen to, say, bread? fuel?
Is it not because central banks are targeting inflation? And because currency created by central banks go to private banks and the government first and not wages at large?
I would appreciate a book answering these questions.
> Is it not because central banks are targeting inflation? And because currency created by central banks go to private banks and the government first and not wages at large?
These are good questions to ask! And the answers are kind of littered around orthodox macro. As well as the real economy. Computer hardware benefits from (astonishingly huge) productivity improvements. Bread does as well, but to a much lesser extent. Fuel, now that goes all over the place, but the increasing capital cost of extracting it as the easier oil has already been extracted plays a part. As does cartelization - OPEC were largely responsible for kicking off US inflation in the 1970s by restricting supply. That's the point at which wages and profits start to diverge on that graph that everyone always circulates.
> I want prices to trend downwards more than salaries.
There have been a lot of policies aimed at keeping wages from rising; both the maintenance of a minimum level of unemployment ("NAIRU" https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/non-accelerating-rate-u...) and the attack on unions and collective bargaining as means of increasing wages. It's policy to make sure there's always somebody ready to underbid you.
Have you read Mises? Because based on this facepalm comment I can only assume you haven't, and that your "knowledge" of Austrian economics is derived from Paul Krugman screeds.
One of the important distinctions between Austrians and Keynsians is that the latter have noticed that money isn't a resource. It's a claim on resources.
The resources of the future that we are spending are the real resources: fuel, clean water, energy, crops, minerals, human effort, the natural environment, and the biosphere services themselves.
You can print money, but you can't print oil. If you print money faster than you exploit real resources, then yes you get inflation. However, the converse is not true. The ultimate demand of anti-inflationists is that your salary remain $X - forever, the cost of a car remains $Y - forever, and the cost of a loaf of bread remains $Z - forever. You can't achieve price stability with technological hacks.
The reason why bitcoinism is so offensive to many people is the way it takes real resources - in this case silicon wafers - and turns them into nothing but money. It's a prayer wheel to Mammon, like Arthur C Clarke's Nine Billion Names Of God.