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Inflation is a Giant “Skim” On the American People
by Charles A. Smith Mises.org
The price of a McDonald’s hamburger in the United States has inflated 3.75 percent annually over the last seventy years. McDonald’s has grown from a tiny hamburger stand in Des Plaines, Illinois, to the second largest fast-food chain on earth. Scale economies alone (never mind process and productivity improvements) should’ve allowed the price of a burger to decline materially over this period.
Why didn’t it? What forces and institutions have conspired to inflate the cost of a simple meal by more than thirteen times over two generations? Many Mises Wire readers know the answer, but few Americans are economically astute enough to understand or describe what Vladimir Lenin called the “surest means of overturning the existing basis of society.”