Stabilizing prices is immoral by Steve Randy Waldman

It is certainly true that there are groups in our society whose purchasing power we ought to collectively insure: retirees on fixed incomes, savers with moderate nest eggs. It is great that Social Security payouts are indexed, so that retirees enjoy some protection of purchasing power. But indexing is a visible, and visibly costly, form of social insurance. Because it is visible, we transparently ration its provision and allocate its costs. I do not argue that purchasing power insurance is immoral. On the contrary, we need purchasing power insurance and the state should invent explicit means to provide it. What is immoral is to hide what is arguably the government’s largest social insurance program behind the technocratic phrase “price stability”. This a scheme that forces the most precarious members of our society to insure the purchasing power of the most secure, without any limit or even any accounting of the scale of the transfer.