Of course, the corollary is that [deflation] is a burden to those at the other end of the spectrum, the wealthy, who hold a vast proportion of the "financial assets" in any economy, i.e. those things which increase in value as a function of inflation, and thus all their financial and political influence is bought to bear to ensure that a consistent inflation is the policy of the central bank and government of the day.

I think you have it backwards. Investors hate inflation because it decreases the value of fixed assets over time. Consumers, particularly wage earners and especially borrowers, suffer least from inflation or actually benefit from it because they tend to renegotiate salaries on an ongoing basis, and inflation causes the burden of debt they take on decreases in absolute terms over time.

Think of it this way. If I borrow $100 in year 0, and there is inflation of the money supply, by year 10 the actual value of what I've borrowed in constant year 0 dollars is more like $80 — while over the same time my wages, and therefore my ability to pay off my debt, will have been roughly keeping pace with inflation and therefore be about the same, in year 0 dollars, as when I first took out the loan.

The bank that lent me the money, of course, is suffering a loss equivalent to my (relative) gain. They would far prefer deflation to inflation, but they know that they depend on me for their own livelihood, so an economy which is deflationary (that is, which benefits them and harms me) would lead to longer-term problems for them once I was bankrupt and incapable of ever borrowing money again.

Much of the anguish one hears in the popular press about the evils of inflation is anguish that has been paid for by the economic powers that be — investors and bankers who hate seeing the value of their loans and investments dwindle year after year. When they claim that inflation hurts the little people most of all and that they are only looking out for their interests, it is a complete and utter lie.

The thing is that in any healthy economy inflation is inevitable. So the best that people who invest or lend money really can hope for is to know in advance what the rate of inflation will be, so they can plan around it. Hence the system of targeted inflationary rates — that is the best one can achieve in terms of "fighting inflation." To drive inflation down too far would be to destroy the real engine of economic growth, which is mass commerce (the vast bulk of which is conducted by the non-wealthy classes), not investment.

It is not a sinister conspiracy to force-feed the American people something which is bad for them while pretending to hate it. It is a fairly transparent attempt to protect their own selves from economic volatility, which they sincerely hating every bit as much as they say they do.

In fact, the path you are pointing to (or gushing at) is the path of raw populism, which has given us Mussolini and Hitler as well as Ron Paul and William Jennings Bryan (and Huey Long, and George Wallace and countless others).

I hereby object to the insertion of Hitler into an otherwise reasonable position in support of "the left/right dichotomy."

(Really it's less of a dichotomy and more of a continuum, and like all continua it implies a certain set of values which it is interested in measuring, and others which it is not. But that is beside the point.)

If the right wing is characterized in part by devotion to monarchial leadership and support for the vested interests of the capital-accumulating class, then it is clear that some Democrats are more right wing than they might like to believe, and that many Republicans are less than we (or they themselves) might mistake them for being.

I'm not unhappy that Obama won, but what is especially pleasing is to see the people who bought him — the financial sector — seeing their interests thwarted despite their best efforts.

There was a point in Arnold Scwarzenegger's governorship when he realized that if he continued to dance with them who brung him, ideologically speaking, he was going to go down in flames come the next election. It's considered a big huge no-no to diss your long-time backers but that's exactly what he did, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth — and it got him re-elected.

Perhaps Obama is heading for a similar sort of crisis. Will he keep on being a right-leaning Democrat and go to the grave a 1-term president? Or will he have the political sense to jump the rail and sell his Wall Street cronies out in exchange for keeping his job?

Key to winning Democratic support was a letter posted early Thursday from labor leaders and progressive economists. The letter, organized by the liberal blog FireDogLake.com, called for a rejection of the Watt substitute and support for Paul.

That is impossible. Direct citizen action doesn't work in this country anymore. No outsider has any influence over the political process. The only thing we can do is throw the whole system out and never ever try to participate in it or apply pressure to it in any way.

Glenn Greenwald must be mistaken about what happened. Maybe he mistakenly typed the word "Key" when he meant "Irrelevant." (An understandable typo — the letters are right next to each other.)

Hopefully a correction will be forthcoming. We can't have people thinking that popular pressure can make a difference in Washtingon, or that their own sneering, vituperous apathy might have been in some way related to elected officials' heretofore unchecked unaccountability.