Inflation Hedge

A temporary solution to a long-term problem...

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, in the context of describing my resumption of volunteer work, that feeding my family with rescued food waste is a good inflation hedge.  I would like to elaborate on that.  

The single income family is a weird thing to a lot of folks I encounter, even some friends.  That has been so since I moved here, and it remains so.  And people are bewildered from multiple perspectives.  Of course they rarely come out and say what they think, but I can gauge their starting point from the questions they ask around the edges of the matter.  Some people pretty obviously just assume that I am lazy.  That the time and labor I put in to be able not just to care for my child myself, but also to largely eschew processed and prepared foods, the service economy, and consumerism in general, would fulfill the demands of a full time job, at least a European one, never seems to occur to some folks, even after they have come to our home and enjoyed a feast for two dozen people which I prepared from scratch.  And that's fine.  If anyone ever really wanted to get into it with me we could estimate my value in this labor market, and then compare that to the myriad savings we enjoy by me staying home.  I've devoted a fair amount of thought to making those estimates, and it's a wash at worst.  When The C finishes primary school, and moves about the city alone, that math will change.  

Some people are traditionalists of European culture, and don't really understand how a man who is not a breadwinner can feel like a man.  That's a rather patriarchal and bigoted stance, but I'll address it anyway.  I don't know how it happened, but my sense of self has never been tied in any way to my source of income.  The idea of a career is weird to me, quite frankly.  I have never in my life considered having anything other than a job.  Paid labor is to earn income.  If it's somewhat enjoyable work, close to home, and it meets my financial needs at the time, that's the job for me.  What I do for work has nothing to do with who I am.  Work is something I do so that when I'm not working I can live my life as I please.  I don't know how I developed that ethos growing up in Houston, TX.  I guess it was just by watching my father and mother, who were also square pegs, looking back.  

I've mentioned this some times before, but it bears repeating.  Over here you can know someone casually for months or years and never know what they do for a living.  People's jobs, even their careers, don't tend to define them like they do in the states.  It's nice.  Stay at home father can still raise the occasional eyebrow though.  The Dutch word for that, by the way, is huisman.  

Still others, without of course ever considering the opportunity costs I mention above, seem baffled that a family wouldn't simply earn as much money as possible.  The cases I've described so far are basically about others not understanding what motivates me.  This is about me not understanding what motivates others.  What the hell are you going to do with all of that money?  How can you get to middle age and not understand that the most precious thing we have is time?  My partner, to her credit, has a career, in a small, yet international, field, where she is well-respected by her peers.  She earns enough money to comfortably support our family of three.  We want for nothing.  Why on earth would I engage with this system through my labor when I want for nothing?  I can't wrap my head around the drive to earn for earning's sake.  It's a different way of seeing the world.  

I suspect the drive to earn as much as possible has something to do with collecting a nest egg, or being able to provide a legacy of some sort.  As a parent I understand that.  As a political philosopher and student of geopolitics I consider it an exercise in futility.  Ultimately, for the vast majority of us, there will be no inflation hedge, only collectivism or barbarism.  

I am a homemaker with no source of income.  I do my job with a housekeeping budget transferred monthly from The P's bank account to mine.  I'm not insolvent.  I have savings in the states.  But our family agreement is that I get x euros per month and I do my best to provide surplus value to my family with that capital.  I think I do a pretty good job of that.  However, recent rapidly rising inflation makes it harder and harder to make ends meet on my end for the past several months, actually this entire year so far.  

Now, again, I've got plenty of money, by my own standards.  And The P makes plenty, also by my standards.  But the struggle I am describing is about me trying to make do with the same amount of money while that money is worth less.  How can I plan, scrimp, strategize, and sequence to provide everything I always have for my family while having significantly less spending power?  Ultimately this is about pushing it as far as I can without going to The P and asking for more money.  My job is to practice thrift to provide value to my family.  Inflationary times make that challenging.  The food that I bring home from my volunteer work is of significant help.  

Which leads me to...  I've mentioned recently my position that not only is this inflationary period not transitory, but that it is very much planned, organized, and intentional.   I've mentioned today that I have some savings in the states.  That savings comprises my entire net worth at this time.  That savings is also worth a great deal less than it was this time last year.  Because inflation.  And I'm using some very basic economic terms here, but I believe that economics is largely hokum.  What is popularly framed as economics is just the machinations of capital, and the economics we are living through today is capital's assault on labor.  

And you are labor, you know.  You.  Me.  Pretty much everyone.  I feel confident saying you because I'm pretty sure no oligarchs are reading this.  The middle and professional classes are the poison pill of liberal democracy.  Liberal democracy was always a detente, and never meant to be a permanent state of affairs, only a strategic retreat by the ruling class.  While various strata of workers are at each others' throats the onslaught has begun again.  Identity politics is always the gift that keeps on giving, but the most insidious division within the proletariat is between rank and file workers and the ruling class lackeys and clerks who have been conditioned to identify with the master's interests...cops, soldiers, academics, doctors, lawyers, bankers, bean counters, bureaucrats, etc...  

You might even be quite well-off within your society, respected, possessed of authority, and wealthy by local standards.  If you don't have at least a modicum of control over some means of production you don't have shit for skin in this game.  And that's going to become abundantly clear in the next several years.  But you need to wake up right now, or it will be too late.  Let me ask you this...  Who is more important to an oligarch?  His accountant?  Or is it the poor schmuck slaving away in his factory?  The middle is not a safe space, not politically, not socially, not economically.  Avoiding conflict is no longer an option, and those who refuse to pick a side will be the only ones with no chance of victory.  

Inflation.  It's here.  I'm like a hundred-thousands-aire.  Ten percent inflation puts a real hit on me.  Twenty percent and my plan for living thriftily for the rest of my life and making due with what I have gets less realistic.  Runaway inflation, which I believe is coming down the pipe, arrives, and I am actually insolvent.  But the thing is, so is almost everyone else.  My nest egg, which is like a quail egg, if that, doesn't endure the approaching strife, and already suffers significantly from the inflation we're already seeing.  But does that upset me?  It does not.  I've seen this coming for some time, and wrote about it.  It's nice to have money in the bank, and I'm lucky as hell to have some, but it has been a long time since I've had faith that cash reserves would provide enduring value.  When the shit really hits the fan the hundred-thousands-aire and the several-million-aire aren't going to be in such different straits, not financially speaking.  That's why accumulation of capital at the level I'm capable of hasn't interested me in many years.  It's not an attractive pursuit for reasons of self-interest, and not even for the sake of my child.  A ruling class level of wealth is beyond me.  I belong to another class, as does my child, as does your child.  I know who my people are, and I'm sticking with them.  Money in the bank isn't going to protect my child.  Guns aren't going to protect my child.  Running away to the hills won't protect my child.  The awful terrifying truth for a parent is that I can't protect my child.  Only community can protect my child.  

My resumption of volunteer activity has been fun and refreshing.  It's a reminder of who I am.  It's easy to forget.  In my personal life I am surrounded mostly by highly educated professionals.  But I forget about my former work life, and how much I enjoy being around people who perform manual labor for a living.  Walking into the kitchen to collect donations twice a week is amazing.  Everybody is talking and laughing.  It's an international group.  I still haven't quite fully figured out who speaks Dutch and who does not.  There is an Italian guy who only speaks to me in French.  English is the one common tongue, but, as there is little to learn by speaking it, the employees I meet mostly try to make themselves understood in less-familiar languages.  I've heard Dutch, Spanish, Arabic, French, and Italian.  People who work with their hands can let their tongues loose and their minds wander.  There's not enough money in the world to compel me to sit quietly and concentrate for a living, nor to toil at a workplace where gravity and decorum in personal interaction is the rule.  I guess that gets to the kernel of my thoughts on careers.  Luckily opinions vary...  

Peace!