Incidentally, two modern followers of Calvin have written extensively on Old Testament law. RJ Ruchdooney wrote a book calling for America to be put under biblical law, including the reintroduction of slavery as criminal punishment. RJ’s son-in-law (Gary North) is in the process of finishing a 20 volume economic commentary on the Bible whose thesis is that the Bible is a free-market document.

Ok, suppose my nominal salary (the specific number of shekels my boss puts in my bank account every month) decreases along with the nominal cost of living. I’m no more hurt than I am helped when my nominal salary increases along with the nominal cost of living. So as much as I’d hate a 5% pay cut in real terms, if everything really cost 5% less, I don’t think I’d mind it much. Actually, deflation in this case really is better for employees. Employers will naturally be much slower to give cost of living raises than cost of living decreases, which means inflation eats away at our salaries faster than than deflation bolsters them.

Pro-deflationists forget that as money becomes more valuable it also become harder to get.

Hardly, because money becoming harder to get is just another way of saying that money is becoming more valuable (ie, more scarce relative to the things for which it’s traded).

You might feel it great to be in a world where to have a million dollars really means something again just the way it did in 1900 but the chances of becoming a millionaire become harder every year.

Being “a millionaire” is irrelevant to my life or to almost anyone else’s. What matters is how many of the goods and services I need and want I’m able to obtain with the money I have. If the money I have becomes more valuable relative to the goods and services available, I’m getting richer.

After there was a site that the nominal values of the 1850s (which look really good compared today’s prices – however when the prices were adjusted for inflation so we could get a look the real prices people in that times really had to pay (i.e. purchasing power) they were paying way more for the basics hence they went hungry and had very little (unfortunately I can’t find it anymore). So it really comes down to productivity gains and purchasing power of your time and if the business are quite happy to continue with doing the former we all get more of the latter.

You said it yourself: “it really comes down to productivity gains.” The relatively very high prices of the mid nineteenth century were not caused by deflation or inflation, but by relatively very low productivity.

I’m sure I never implied otherwise. But of course different parts appeal to different people. Seventh Day Adventists focus on certain verses, the snake-handlers in backwoods Appalachia focus on certain verses, Calvinists focus on theirs, other types of Protestants on theirs, and Catholics on theirs.

Second. The RCC is probably one of the largest leftist organizations on earth, and its not Calvinist by any means. A specific form of leftism may be descended from Calvinism, but the Left in the US today is not exclusively composed of such Calvinist descended leftists.

Marxism is not Calvinist by any means either. Neither is environmentalism or multiculturalism. Except in the ways that they are. I can’t summarize Moldbug well at all, but it’s more than worth going to where he talks about this stuff and reading through it. When I did, I was blown away.

if Mencius thinks that Calvinism is the root of leftism in America, then he is implying that the American experiment was doomed from the moment the Puritans left for America.

I don’t know that he means that, but I do know that he opposes the American War of Independence as an illegal rebellion against the Crown.

since America is a product of the Reformation to damn Calvinism is to state that America itself should not exist.

I guess he’d say, as I would, that the United States of America should not exist in its current form, but would best be broken up into (at least) 50 states.

Mencius should just convert to Catholicism and bloviate endlessly on how Romanism protects us all from the hidden hobgoblins of the world.

But he doesn’t believe that, being an atheist. His problem with Calvinism is not that it picked at the problems in Catholicism, but that it generated progressivism. I think he’s right, even though I find the dour, almost stoic Calvinist approach to life rather refreshing.

After there was a site that the nominal values of the 1850s (which look really good compared today’s prices – however when the prices were adjusted for inflation so we could get a look the real prices people in that times really had to pay (i.e. purchasing power) they were paying way more for the basics hence they went hungry and had very little (unfortunately I can’t find it anymore). So it really comes down to productivity gains and purchasing power of your time and if the business are quite happy to continue with doing the former we all get more of the latter.

2. By deflation I meant a drop in prices. There have been later attempts to approptiate the term for the use of the libertarian crowd, but the definition I was using didn’t refer to the size of the money supply.

3. The Puritans originated as a sect in England seeking to “purify” the newly created Church of England of its remaining Romanist elements. The Puritan movement was very much inspired by Calvinism, and if Mencius thinks that Calvinism is the root of leftism in America, then he is implying that the American experiment was doomed from the moment the Puritans left for America.

In fact, Calvinism was a necessary experiment during the Reformation, and since America is a product of the Reformation to damn Calvinism is to state that America itself should not exist. Mencius should just convert to Catholicism and bloviate endlessly on how Romanism protects us all from the hidden hobgoblins of the world.

Done.

Thanks. Like Moldbug, I hold that progressivism is a form of religious fanaticism driven by, or descended from, Calvinism.

Despite what you have been taught by the folks at mises.org, deflation is not exclusively caused by expansions and contractions in the money supply.

The situation you describe is a decline in prices due to a shift in demand. It actually proves the point I was trying to make, which is that declines in prices are not the same thing as deflation – defined as a contraction in the money supply.