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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (264173)	5/14/2008 9:57:24 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

>> Should the CPI be based on changes in prices of horse drawn carriages, petticoats, and mechanical pocket watches? In the particular example of horse and buggy (which in actuality is not part of CPI), CPI should be based on the average price of one's driving from home to work. The key here is that should be dealing with averages for the commute (rather than actual distances) and that we should be keeping the key experience (in this driving) fixed. To claim that somehow I am getting more from the car because I am commuting further to work or to claim that because I have radio in the car and I could not have one in the carriage and therefore I should pay more for this (whether or not I want the radio and whether or not it is practical to say everyone should be working within a mile or two of their home as they did 200 years ago) is silly. Suppose that next year due to War in the Persian Gulf the price of gasoline shoots up to $10/gl. This is a 300% price inflation (at least as far as gas is concerned). Now suppose that due to this big jump in the price of gas, most people stop driving to work and either take the public transportation or carpool. As a result, let's say that gas consumption drops by 67%. Using your logic then (and that of the government's) the increase in price of gas should have zero effect on CPI because although the price went up 3-fold, the consumption dropped to a third. IMO, such a CPI would be plainly wrong. The fact that dynamic negative-feedback systems such as price-demand interaction are inherently stable is being abused by the government to mask real inflation. Just because one cannot afford to drive to work anymore due to price inflation is not the same as "people don't want to drive to work just like they don't want to ride a horse to work". ST

To: TimF who wrote (264173)	5/15/2008 1:09:25 AM
From: c.hinton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

re food and the cost of living "Let them eat cake" (how often does one get a chance to use this phrase in an almost pertinent context)g Origin The origin of many phrases in English are unknown. Nevertheless, many people would say that they know the source of this one. It is widely attributed to Marie-Antoinette (1755-93), the Queen consort of Louis XVI. She is supposed to have said this when she was told that the French populace had no bread to eat. The original The French is Qu'ils mangent de la brioche. It has been suggested that the speaker's intention wasn't as cynical as is generally supposed. French law required bakers to sell loaves at fixed prices and fancy loaves had to be sold at the same price as basic breads. This was aimed at preventing bakers from selling just the more profitable expensive products. The let them eat brioche (a form of cake made of flour, butter and eggs) would have been a sensible suggestion in the face of a flour shortage as it would have allowed the poor to eat what would otherwise have been unaffordable. It's rather a mouthful, so to speak, but if the phrase had been reported as 'let them buy cake at the same price as bread' we might now think better of the French nobility. Two notable contemporaries of Marie-Antoinette - Louis XVIII and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, attribute the phrase to another source. In Louis XVIII's memoir Relation d'un voyage a Bruxelles et d Coblentz (1791) he states that the phrase 'Que ne mangent-ils de la croûte de pâté?' (Why don't they eat pastry?) was used by Marie-Thérèse (1638-83), the wife of Louis XIV. That account was published almost a century after Marie-Thérèse's death though, so it must be treated with some caution. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 12-volume autobiographical work Confessions, was written in 1770. In Book 6, which was written around 1767, he recalls: At length I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who, on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, "Then let them eat pastry!" Marie-Antoinette arrived at Versailles from her native Austria in 1770, two or three years after Rousseau had written the above passage. Whoever the 'great princess' was - possibly Marie-Thérèse , it wasn't Marie-Antoinette. Her reputation as an indulgent socialite is difficult to shake, but it appears to be unwarranted and is a reminder that history is written by the victors. She was known to have said "It is quite certain that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune, we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness". Nevertheless, the French revolutionaries thought even less of her than we do today and she was guillotined to death in 1793 for the crime of treason.