Severe Impediments to National Economic Recovery and Prosperity

Question: How can one effectively explain the absence of something unseen that could have yet existed?   Perhaps, there are those things to be called “invisibilities” that are highly important but still, nonetheless, incapable of physically being perceived as such in their quite obvious absence, in their overt nonexistence.  For instance, many people cannot immediately see how the cost of living is always directly related to their own standard of living and vice versa, of course. 

Amity Shlaes, in her book The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, interestingly notes how the humble Hershey candy bar was maintained at the same nominal price; but, in fact, the physical size, quantity, of it had actually decreased such that people paid, in effect, much more money for much less product.  And, it needs to be greatly stressed that this had occurred during the supposed nearly total deflationary era of the 1930s, which, thus, highlights heavily its true economic significance.

Therefore, if one would logically multiply this effect on a scale of millions upon millions of goods and/or services in an entire economy, this would properly indicate that the actual standard of living had been reduced relative to the real cost of living (even adjusted for inflation), regardless of the then mere price involved that could even, e.g., appear to be fixed, as with the notable Hershey bar example.

Some Interesting Points for Consideration

Three important matters will be critically discussed that are almost always simply neglected regarding economic discussions concerning how to restore or maintain national economic prosperity.   Irrefutable arguments were formulated many decades ago, by such Austrian School of Economics (ASE) economists as Ludwig von Mises, that an upper class performs a necessary utilitarian function, within any modern economy, concerning the helpful generation of genuine prosperity.  

The libertarian economist Henry Hazlitt, on another point, demonstrated how difficult it always is to explain to people how what they cannot see in terms of lost goods and/or services, in an economy, is yet a real and significant economic loss and not just an always supposedly meaningless abstraction.

The third thing to be mentioned is how seemingly impossible it is to economically convince people that a tremendous and growing national debt that remains almost totally unfunded can still truly retard national economic development and prosperity for literally generations to come; this is besides the harm to present generations.  Argumentation, in this article, will be prefaced upon the ASE’s type of thinking concerning how such matters do destroy the efforts of a free-market economy to successfully and functionally generate massive wealth and, furthermore, to axiomatically spread that needed wealth throughout a modern industrial or, if one prefer, postindustrial society.