I have a friend living in Argentina. His father-in-law is a businessman with a factory. Like many successful people in Argentina, he is a master at exploiting chaos for personal benefit. The father-in-law praised inflation, explaining it was a useful tool for people like him, and offered the following story:
I was walking down the street and found my wares being sold in a shop that doesn't retail for me. Doing some digging, I found incontrovertible proof that my foreman of ten years---ten years!!!---had been stealing from me.
Did I fire him? No. It is impossible to fire your employees, even for provable malfeasance.
Did I sue him? No. You lose 95% of these kinds of cases.
Did I tell the police? No. You can't get the police involved with anything important, like my business, they are too corrupt.
So what did I do? I simply told him I would never give him a raise again. And he understood that---due to radical inflation---his salaried buying power would keep dropping and dropping, until it was chiseled away to nothing. So he quit.
[edit: I am in no way suggesting that FIL was the moral actor in this story, I don't know if he was or wasn't screwing his foreman into poverty before the theft. What I found fascinating about this story was how things were systematically fucked in across so many possible dimensions, that individual instances of corruption and inefficiency and lack of faith are intertwined. i.e. there's a whole rat's nest of problems to untangle and a point intervention is unlikely to prompt broader change. Also see interesting discussion below about root causes of the inflation, which connect to some of the anecdote above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30101931]
I was walking down the street and found my wares being sold in a shop that doesn't retail for me. Doing some digging, I found incontrovertible proof that my foreman of ten years---ten years!!!---had been stealing from me.
Did I fire him? No. It is impossible to fire your employees, even for provable malfeasance.
Did I sue him? No. You lose 95% of these kinds of cases.
Did I tell the police? No. You can't get the police involved with anything important, like my business, they are too corrupt.
So what did I do? I simply told him I would never give him a raise again. And he understood that---due to radical inflation---his salaried buying power would keep dropping and dropping, until it was chiseled away to nothing. So he quit.
[edit: I am in no way suggesting that FIL was the moral actor in this story, I don't know if he was or wasn't screwing his foreman into poverty before the theft. What I found fascinating about this story was how things were systematically fucked in across so many possible dimensions, that individual instances of corruption and inefficiency and lack of faith are intertwined. i.e. there's a whole rat's nest of problems to untangle and a point intervention is unlikely to prompt broader change. Also see interesting discussion below about root causes of the inflation, which connect to some of the anecdote above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30101931]