A price or $2,000 in today's dollars is only about $1,600 in 1998 dollars. So comparing everything in 1998 dollars, a decent system is about $400 less than it was back then. But however you want to measure it, prices have steadily declined over the last forty years. A TRS-80 back in 1979 would have cost $3K. That's $8,956.69 in today's dollars. My pentium-based Linux system was $3,000 in 1995. That's $3,935.29 in today's dollars. And my Macbook pro was $2,500 last year. That's about $2,585 in today's dollars.
Normalizing for inflation, the price has steadily declined. In nominal terms, the price of a comparably-ranked system has declined very slightly--but the power of that system has grown exponentially over that time according to Moore's law. So pricing storage in dollars/GB, RAM in dollars/MB, CPU in dollars/megaflop, the price has declined steeply over the years despite inflation.
You missed the central point - most of expansion in the 1990s happened by NUMBER of computers, not unit price. Zeroing inflation would work fine and dandy if the economy is essentially stagnant and the only difference is the tech level of each computer, while the total number of computers in operation remains the same. But the whole point of the argument we are having is that if the economy expands, as measured if imperfectly by the number of computers sold per year, you have to expand the money supply to match the increase in total wealth.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Woo, latin, you must be smart then.
Hehehe.
Fine, we cannot turn the clock, do an experiment, and see what will happen. Even if we could, people would be crazy to let us try. But, just explain to us what exactly you think would happen if there is no federal reserve, no adjustment to money supply or interest rates. Just totally free market. Will it result in more stability or less? Will it lead to 1929s or not?
Unless I promise not to take your lunch money, it's not stealing.
Bad analogy. Nobody puts a gun to your head to keep the specie. If you believe the gov is a tuna-sandwich bully that can and will take your tuna sandwich, then get the egg salad. You'd still be wrong, but at least perfectly safe.
You appear not to have it quite straight. Stockholders are in fact entitled to their share of the firm's assets. However, other obligations have seniority. Bond-holders, for example, are paid first. It simply happens that when a company enters receivership, the senior obligations usually exceed the firm's assets, so junior obligations such as common stock end up with nothing.
Actually, it is a perfect analogy - the instrument people hold in both cases is a bit more complex, conditional, and risky, than they choose to believe. Common shareholders choose to believe they will get something after the creditors and privileged stock sharks are done with the carcass of the company. People that sleep on paper mattresses choose to believe that their paper will not depreciate badly. They are both deluding themselves and taking risks, whether they acknowledge it or not.
In any case, the analogy is meaningless. Government has no right to seize the fruit of my labor (though they do so anyway), and forcing me at gunpoint (through legal tender laws) to use their scrip, which they then inflate out from under me, is simple robbery.
Nobody forces you to keep US scrip. You can have all your savings in euros, drahmas, pounds, marks, roubles, or whatever else you want. If you don't like money, you can invest in precious metals, diamonds, guns, commemorative plates, even baseball cards and collectibles. Nobody puts a gun to your head telling you to keep greenbacks in a bucket under your bed. I sure don't, and neither should you, if you know what's good for you. Yeah, I use them to buy stuff, and will keep using them so long as gov recognizes them and people take them.
It's indirect robbery, which is why they like it so much: it fools most of the people most of the time.
The average US family's savings account is less than 5,000 dollars. Most people don't save enough to be affected by inflation to their savings in any meaningful way. Meanwhile the retirement accounts are growing at least as quickly as money-markets, and therefore generally keep up with the inflation. Those who do have larger savings, generally are also savvy enough to invest in equity, real estate, their own businesses, etc. Thus, your complaint simply does not correspond to the objective reality. You are proposing a dangerous destabilizing solution to a non-existent problem.