How Inflationism Brings About Quality or Value Deflation

Retired professor Michael S. Rozeff at the Lew Rockwell blog explains how monetary inflationism results to the deterioration or deflation in the quality of food products.

Here is Professor Rozeff:

Ever since inflation took off in the 1960s, the food has gone downhill. That's not the only cause of it, but it's one cause. The food companies have tried to hold prices down by cheapening the food and cutting down the quantities. They've eliminated many good ingredients and substituted drek. There are foods today that I wouldn't feed to a dog.

Many bacon makers have watered the bacon. Water is a cheap ingredient! When you fry it, the water comes out and so does some white guck. I made bacon from the age of 10, and I can tell you for sure that this stuff isn't cutting it. The meat itself? Forget it! They've bred the fat out of pork, beef, and now lamb and with it went the flavor, the juiciness, and the tenderness. If you watch the food shows on TV, the cooks are constantly adding everything under the sun to the meats in an effort to create something that tastes halfway decent.

A can that says chunk tuna fish actually contains flakes that used to be what cat food was. Many common soups are salt baskets.

If a package says ORIGINAL INGREDIENTS, you simply cannot believe it! It will usually have partially hydrogenated oil and corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup, stuff that didn't exist when many of these brands first began or else wasn't used. They used to use sugar. A Sara Lee cake when first introduced was almost as good as homemade because it had the butter and makings that people used in their kitchens. It still has some butter down there after soybean oil, although maybe not since it says the butter is (cream, salt) . It has "Sugar, enriched bleached flour (wheat flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, eggs, soybean oil, butter (cream, salt), skim milk, corn syrup." That's before the 2% or less of the chemicals: "glycerin, leavening (sodium aluminum phosphate, baking soda, monocalcium phosphate), corn starch, natural and artificial flavors, salt, mono- and diglycerides, potassium sorbate (preservative), gums (xanthan, gellan), colored with (turmeric and annatto extract), wheat starch, soy lecithin, soy flour." Sara Lee is one of the better cases. Your typical product is usually even worse.

I find this anecdote highly relevant here in the Philippines. 

When I recently interviewed my neighborhood carinderias or eateries (small scale informal food retail businesses) on how they usually respond to rising commodity prices, their reply has mostly been to reduce the content or quantity or quality of their servings, first, because of the fear that raising prices would diminish the capacity of their consumers to spend or would lead to "poor sales".

Simon Black of the Sovereign Man labels such value deflation as shadow inflation,

Value deflation is not taught at university economics courses; you’ll never hear any of these Nobel economists or central bankers mention it. Stiglitz, Krugman, and Bernanke all happily tow the line that ‘there is no inflation’ because the price of iPads keeps going down.

These are the people who have the power to influence policy and conjure trillions of dollars out of thin air… and it’s amazing how easily they can hide the truth from people through this shadow inflation.

Curiously, this is what passes as a free society today. It is a truly, truly bizarre system.’

It’s unfortunate to see how these small scale entrepreneurs, fighting for survival, gets the kernel of the blame from supposed unethical practices, which has been used to justify more regulatory interventions (promoted by mainstream media), when they have merely been responding to the incentives brought about by immoral policies.

This shows how policies of inflationism-interventionism destroys the moral fabric of a society.