Shut Up and Stay Poor: A Tough Pill to Swallow

Had Marie Antoinette in fact said, “let them eat cake” when the starving masses said they couldn’t afford bread, then the Bank of England’s top economist’s Huw Pill would perhaps have seen no issue in her words.

Pill stated on a recent American Podcast that there is a “reluctance to accept that, yes, we’re all worse off.”

The inference in his words is that we should all just accept the errors of those in power, keep our mouths shut, let our children go hungry and our elderly perish – all while Huw is taking home the tidy sum of 190k per year! Was there ever such a visibly out-of-touch comment from someone who is not thinking of the consequences of his own actions?

It’s amazing that the Chief Economist of the Bank of England is telling the rest of us to just accept that we’re poorer and put up with it, when inflation has largely been caused by the Bank of England’s massive money-printing spree during lockdown. And this is after the Governor of the BoE said last year that quantitative easing (money-printing) does not cause inflation.

YES IT DOES!

Not only that, but he has consistently been wrong about the trajectory of UK inflation. At the start of the inflation up-tick he said it was just a blip and would be over in a month or so…then it was six months…then it was ‘down by the end of the year…but still inflation marches on.

How do these people get, and keep, their jobs? They seem to say and do everything wrong!

The last few years have seen an all-too-transparent lack of respect from the top echelons of government regarding the welfare of the struggling masses below, particularly the problems brought on by their obviously wrong-headed imposition of a lockdown on the country. Added to that we have seen  base corruption and misappropriation of funds (PPE scandal, NHS covid app etc) and cronyism (giving their friends and relatives all the top jobs and salaries).

As the economist Ludwig von Mises stated in the last century, “The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation. They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless spending and of lavishly subsidising and bribing the voters.” inflation is caused by governments, supported by their central banks. The inflation we are suffering now is a result of government and central bank profligacy and short-term thinking.

Sadly, the only way out of rampant inflation is pain – our pain, the pain that the consumer will have to go through in order to bring it down. This is essentially what Huw Pill was saying, and it’s true: if we want to fight inflation it’s us, the consumers, who will have to suffer in order for it to happen. Is that what you voted for?