The ledger does not lie

Reason reports that a viral debate over a $20 burrito has cracked open a wider argument about inflation — and that some politicians have responded to ordinary Americans' frustration by telling them, in effect, to stop whining. I would counsel those politicians to spend a week behind the counter of a modest shop before they speak again. The person who buys lunch with wages earned by the hour knows the price of money more precisely than any theorist who has never had to make the numbers balance at the end of the month.

I spent years as a printer, which is to say I spent years buying paper, ink, and labor on credit, and selling the finished product for whatever the market would bear. When the currency in which I was paid lost its purchasing power, the loss did not appear as an abstract percentage in a gazette — it appeared as a shorter stack of firewood, a thinner cut of meat, a debt that grew faster than the revenue to retire it. A $20 burrito is simply that same lesson served warm.

Paper money, well-secured and honestly administered, is among the most useful instruments a trading society can devise. I argued as much when Pennsylvania was deliberating its own currency in my earlier years. But paper money badly secured — issued beyond the discipline of any real backing, inflated by spending that outpaces production — is a slow tax levied most heavily on those who hold wages rather than assets. The wage-earner cannot flee into land or equities on a Tuesday afternoon. She spends what she earns, and she feels every penny of the depreciation.

The politicians who tell working people to "stop whining" (Reason's phrasing) are committing a civic error as well as a rhetorical one. Self-government depends on the governed believing that their testimony about their own lives is taken seriously. Dismiss the $20 burrito as a triviality, and you do not make the burrito cheaper — you make the citizen angrier and more estranged from the institutions that are supposed to serve her. That is a very poor bargain for the Republic. I should note: whether today's inflation traces to pandemic spending, supply-chain fractures, energy shocks, or some combination is a matter of modern economic inference I cannot settle from first principles — but the household reality Reason describes requires no theory to verify.

Here, then, is the counsel I would offer to any working person reading this: keep your own price journal. Write down what a dozen eggs, a tank of fuel, and a modest lunch cost you today, and compare it honestly to what the same basket cost two years ago. That private ledger is your hedge against being gaslit by anyone — politician or pundit — who insists the pain is imaginary. And it is the first step toward the kind of disciplined household economy that no government can inflate away from you, because it lives in your habits rather than your wallet.