According to some versions of anti-Fed propaganda, supposedly since the founding of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, the U.S. dollar has lost, say, 95 percent of its "value" in 97 years, which I guess implies an exponential decay rate r = ln(1 - 0.95)/97 ≈ - 0.031.
One, that already sounds like a dollar "collapse," taken literally. Yet Americans in 2010 live far better with their allegedly "collapsed" dollars than Americans alive in 1913 did with their pre-"collapsed" dollars before the Federal Reserve went into business. A dollar "collapse" of that sort doesn't sound like a catastrophe.
Two, doesn't this trend also suggest what could happen to the dollar in the future? Instead of some kind of discontinuity like hyperinflation (the American right's version of a global warming apocalypse), why wouldn't we just continue to see the dollar's conjectural "value" decay exponentially over the long run at about the same rate as over the previous century, along with rising real living standards?
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