Dumb Fed's Inflation Fight: Raise interest rates instead of Reduce workweek length

          Federal Reserve
  1. Inflation Fight: When the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to fight inflation, the Fed effectively reduces the overall workweek and reduces average worker's income. Less money means less inflationary pressure. Voila. Simple solution to inflation ... if no downstream ugly complications.
  2. Acute Collateral Damage: As unfolding in mid-March, 2023, the Fed's recent and predicted interest rate hikes had unintended collateral damage: Creating potentially the worst financial crisis since the 2007 financial crisis that could be worse than the 1930's Great Depression.
  3. Chronic Victims: Unemployment begets hell-on-earth . More jobless workers means more abuse of drugs, spouses and children as well as road rage and workplace violence. A 1% rise in unemployment (1.6 million) is matched by 32,000 suicides. Directly reducing the workweek so everyone remains employed would eliminate the Fed's morbid approach to reducing inflation. No recession. No depression. When people know that the workweek length will be adjusted then they will have the emotional stability of hope. Statistically current full employment at declining slave wages without hope of future emancipation is not cause for hope but for hate.
  4. Unions caused the welfare state: Observing rising unemployment in the 1930s, a US Supreme Court Justice proposed reducing the workweek length to keep full employment of all Americans. Like the new farmers in Animal Farm, unions said "No way." Instead of reducing the workweek to addressed unemployment, big-eared FDR cranked up the money printing presses per John Maynard Keynes' economic model. Voila. The welfare state and national debt.

    Inflation: The Lost Time Indexed by Inflation (index)
  5. Inflation Cheapens Your Worktime: If you save 100 hours of wages but inflation reduces the saving's buying power by 50%, it is as if you only worked half of the time. Inflation steals the sweat of your brow. An annual 10% inflation rate without a corresponding wage hike effectively cuts your 40-hour workweek to 36 hours of compensation.
  6. Unemployment, the worst kind of inflation: Whereas a 10% inflation rate effectively cheapens a worker's workweek income by 10%, unemployment imposes a 100% inflation rate. The cheapening nature of inflation can be seen in its semantic cousins, flattery and flatulence.
  7. Inflation is an inflated word (poem): One has more money but less buying power. Why? Economist forget the origin of currency: What is your time currently worth. Thus, they don't strive to keep the symbols of worktime married to substance of worktime. Wealth becomes divorced from worth. Privileges (private laws) are legislated by the re-election of addicted public law-makers to enrich their contributors. (see Currency: Symbols or Substance).
    1. Monflation: More money chasing same amount of goods and services. When politicians turn on the money presses to spend their way out of economic problems. A historical lesson: "Nothing prepared the German people for the excesses of Hitler as the Inflation."
    2. Sinflation: Same money chasing shortage of goods and services. Politicians enable greedy corporations to metastasize false shortages, e.g., Enron, steel, food, gas and oil. Sinflation will become a bigger component of overall inflation as our CO2-sins against Mother Nature causes her droughts, deluges, fires and storms to destroy global agriculture: Shortages of food in an overpopulating world.

      (If this is a truncated version of the essay, visit www.DumbFed.org for the full essay.)