> If a billionaire wants to bury all his money, he's only hurting himself.
Nope, if you're fixing the supply of money, you're making the monetary economy zero sum. If a rich person buries his money, that's less money available to everyone else that needs money, forcing them to work harder to earn the same amount of income to pay their bills. The billionaire on the other hand ends up richer than before without taking any risks or doing any work, or even maintaining anything
> By contrast inflation is very different. Ostensibly everybody has their spending power reduced, but the wealthy can sidestep this by hoarding assets, whereas lower income individuals lack the resources to do so. In both systems the rich get richer. The major difference is what happens to the non-rich. In deflationary systems, they see their spending power increase over time. In inflationary systems, they see it decrease.
This is just nonsense though, isn't it? The rich can hoard assets in any sort of system, but you are the person explicitly advocating a system rigged to ensure that the asset they hoard is fixed in supply and required by the non-rich as a means of payment, guaranteeing the rich risk free gains in perpetuity from starving the economy of resources. By contrast when the economy isn't rigged to preserve people who hold cash's wealth at the expense of those who need to earn cash, rich people have to invest in stuff like companies, which carries risk and actually contributes towards stuff being made and people having jobs
Non rich people can't afford to hoard cash in either system, they have bills to pay and need somewhere to live. In the US today, most non-rich people store most of their net worth in their house, an asset you are advocating becoming an expensive burden on them which will never increase in value.
As for the poor people living month to month, they don't get to store any non-trivial amount of value in either system. But an economy that isn't starved of capital offers them jobs, which is a lot better than "hey, that cash you need to spend on this month's food would buy you even more food this time next year if you didn't need to eat, why are you even worried about the unemployment rate?"
> The thing I think you're not appreciating is self-feedback within systems. Consider education. Why are education costs inflating far ahead of already high inflation rates? It's because education is/was perceived as relatively priceless, and the government passed various laws mandating and enabling the ease of access to debt. So you take something that was perceived as priceless and give people vast sums of debt to purchase it. The exact same is true of housing. The endless inflation-driven price increases make it seem like a priceless asset. Now insert debt and away we go.
The thing I think you're not appreciating is that I'm the participant in this discussion that understands how supply and demand works. The reason why the price of education grows ahead of income, and the growth in the number of people that would like graduate jobs exceeds the growth in reputable college places, and since college places also proportionally boost people's lifetime incomes, it's usually a good bet. This is nothing to do with it being "priceless". Suffice to say non-rich people who want college places are not helped by either by making it expensive or impossible to access finance or depressing their future incomes, even though both factors will ceteris paribus depress tuition fees.
> The reason I've focused on data from 1950 is because that's the final decade before we entered the full-on money printing era.
The reason you've focused on data from 1950s which is not an example of the policy you advocate is the last time we had the two things you favour (policy actually encouraging year on year deflation due to the US money supply being limited by its redeemability for gold) was a time of misery almost unprecedented in modern history. And if you want a money supply that's actually fixed in terms of commodities rather than going through repeated inflation/crash cycles as banks try to deal with the gold supply being insufficient, we're going back to pre-industrial times. There's a reason why there's no period of sustained deflation in modern history for you to compare with outside a massive credit crunch, and that's that sustained deflation is synonymous with a credit crunch, with all the side effects that entails.
CPI inflation in the 1950s averaged around where it's been for most of this century (and the Fed's actual target), just with more volatility. It was much higher the decade before (during which the US won a war, and also found enough money left over to boost the housing stock). The fact a decade with inflation averaging just under 2% is actually compatible with the job outlook being relatively rosy and more people being able to buy homes than before actually fits my argument better than yours.
Memes about 1950s purchasing power[1] to counter boomer arguments is not an argument against the tautology that deflation is sustained by people who contribute to the economy working harder and taking more risks with their investments to ensure that the people can increase their purchasing power by not contributing to the economy.
[1]fwiw there are an order of magnitude more cars in the US today, and you can definitely buy a better car than most people were driving in the 1950s with a part time job today. And it's funny how those memes never mention other consumer goods, or food or that more people actually manage to buy their home today...