(Wallich was no latecomer to this view. He served on President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers. After stepping down, and having seen a stream of opportunist Ivy League economics professors convince Washington that economic “growth” was America’s patriotic duty, Wallich wrote a short book. The Cost of Freedom recognized growth as a very good thing, but not when government boosts the growth. Such a “forced draft economy” compromises individual freedom.)

Authoritarianism can be invisible. The government’s employment of the substitution effect in the consumer price index is an affront to the people it represents. The clandestine nature of such maneuvers should not be overstated. The unread Boskin Commission Report makes its methodology clear: “Pork and beef are two separate CPI item categories. If the price of pork increases while the price of beef does not, consumers might shift away from pork to beef. The [CPI] is designed to account for this type of consumer substitution between CPI item categories."

The American people have been forewarned of this duplicity. Yet it is still impossible for a nongovernment employee to calculate the effect of substitution. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not reveal which items are jettisoned. For all we know, the government may be substituting peanut butter cups for pork. In a tangential sense, it already is. The biggest single cost in raising a pig for slaughter is feed. Corn, part of the traditional meal, is too expensive. According to The Wall Street Journal , pigs now feast on a diet of trail mix, licorice, peanut butter cups, cheese curls, Cocoa Puffs, and Tater Tots.

Such substitutions as beef for pork are crystal clear compared with another Boskin Commission CPI-shrinking maneuver: “Just as consumers change the goods they purchase in response to changes in relative prices, as in the beef and [pork] example, so do they change the location where they make their purchases. The opening of a new discount store outlet may give consumers the opportunity to purchase at a lower price than before.” The consumer may -- and certainly does, in the government’s calculation -- choose to drive an extra 10 miles to save 30 cents for a gallon of milk (this lower price no doubt programmed into the CPI), but the time wasted is not an explicit cost. Nor the cost of gas.

The diminishing dignity of the American people cannot be calculated. Kathleen Parker wrote in the Chicago Tribune about call center hell (not her description). She spoke to someone in India “named Kapil pretending to be Karen…Anglicizing names is one of the tricks of the trade these days as more and more customer services are outsourced to other countries.” History may not repeat, but Parker describes what Wallich observed in the 1920s and the 1970s. Once again, the strong are smart enough to understand that inflation “introduces an element of deceit into most of our economic dealings.” Contracts are no longer made to “be kept in terms of constant values” but one party understands this better than the other. Here is a concrete example of Wallich’s abstract description of monetary inflation as an “unpredictably shifting [measure] of weight, time or space…”

Parker goes on: “The corporate insult of hiring foreigners is compounded by the pandering of passive-aggressive non-Americans. Between robots and foreign operators -- and the powerlessness most consumers feel -- American business has robbed its citizen-customers of their dignity.” Hopelessness also demeans the shopper who stares at the butcher’s counter in despair -- personal character wobbles from constant disorientation, but the government is here to help.

The companies employing Indian call centers cannot be wholly faulted: Costs have soared. There seems to be a common impression that “offshoring” is a recent phenomenon. Yet the corporate flight has been a nonstop, one-way transfer since the gold standard entered its death throes. (Readers may decide whether this is coincidental or not.) By 1969, many wage settlements called for 30-35% increases over a three-year contract period. As dollar devaluation whipped into high gear, Time magazine reported: “Manufacturers decided long ago to serve foreign markets by building plants overseas, rather than by exporting. The multinational corporations will profit from devaluation.” From manufacturers to call centers -- and now security analysts in India make buy-and-sell recommendations for Wall Street firms -- first, blue-collar workers fell behind. Then, the middle class gasped for breath. Now, the money class is suffering. The team from Gavekal -- they of the acclaimed platform company -- noted, “It has never been so expensive to be rich.” Costs for the rich have been “bid up to astronomical prices.” This is their Brave New World.

The current debate about the rising divide between the rich and poor may be an argument whose time has passed. Maybe a forward-looking presidential candidate could upstage the competition by asking: “Are we all getting poorer together?”

“Lenin was certainly right,” affirmed John Maynard Keynes. “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

The invisible costs of inflation may be more ruinous than prices we can read at the butcher’s shop.