What is $5,000 worth today, and is it better than 1,600 in the 80's?

The title of the thread is:

What is $5,000 worth today, and is it better than 1,600 in the 80's?

Dozen relevant posts on precisely that topic later Eric says:

Based on how much we have deviated from discussion of audio

Does the OP even know what he OP'd?

Synergistic Research CTS speaker cable came out in 2004, +/- a year or so. It cost about $7k back then. It used Active Shielding. Today 15 years later Synergistic Atmosphere Level 4 runs about $5k. It doesn't need Active Shielding. It can be grounded, but even without it still easily outperforms CTS. For less money. Even before accounting for the depreciation in the value of the money, its pretty clear you can get more for your audio dollar today.

Not everything is the same. I been saying for years Synergistic is ahead of the game. But they are far from alone. You do still have to search, study, filter, and keep your focus on the job at hand. If you go all scatter brained forgetting what's going on, that's another story altogether.

Anyone who reads Ron Paul will be shocked to discover the crotchety old geezer has a deep well grounded knowledge of our constitutional republic and monetary system. Turns out there’s a reason they make him look on TV like a yammering old crank- he’s talking point blank about tyranny and liberty and how they institute the one while making us think we’ve got the other.

The Federal Reserve Bank is neither federal (its privately owned) nor holds any reserves (its all paper certificates) and isn’t even a bank but a clever way of bailing out banks. It was the third US central bank, the first two having failed so disastrously no one would have supported another. But we were tricked into it. The fascinating story is told:

https://www.chinhnghia.com/The-Creature-from-Jekyll-Island-by-G.-Edward-Griffin.pdf

Edwin Vieira is a constitutional scholar and attorney who has argued AND WON cases before the Supreme Court. His magnum opus on money-
https://www.amazon.com/Pieces-Eight-Disabilities-Constitution-Foundation/dp/0967175917

These are the anti-dotes to the brainwashing we call education, so effective I came out of college with a business degree and knew all about stocks and bonds and yet somehow mysteriously never a word about silver and gold. A whole four year degree built around the uses of money without ever a word about what money actually is. Now I know why.

With sound money, money with actual intrinsic value that cannot be created from nothing, all the power is with the people. We would find better and more efficient uses, everything would be cheaper and better and more, and questions like Eric asked, the answers self-evident.

As it is we still manage to have improvements with technologies like Synergistic and Tekton use, a whole bunch of things that never even existed 50 years ago and make music sound better than ever. B&O developed a moving iron cartridge, Soundsmith developed it to perform light years better. And the only reason its Hyperion is $8k instead of $80 is our bogus unit of measure.

I am not an economist so I don’t know enough of inflation (except that it goes higher and higher), but the quality of equipment is "much" better now.

Right. The answer is simple and staring you right in the face every time you open your wallet. But we’re all so conditioned to believe the lie we won’t believe the truth even when clearly explained. Hold my beer and watch this:

Printed right on the green bills in there are the words Federal Reserve Note. A note is a loan. You could look it up. Its an IOU. That’s why if you go on-line or to a coin shop and look up our old currency, it used to say things like "payable to the bearer on demand in gold" or silver, or "there exists in the vaults gold..." in other words the paper was a claim on physical money (gold and silver) and the further back you go the more explicit and clear this was. Printed right on the note.

As a matter of fact if you go back to 1776 the Constitution defines money as gold and silver coin, and gives congress the authority to regulate its fineness. You don’t regulate the "fineness" of a paper Federal Reserve Note. FRNs you "print" like this: Ctrl+P. Yeah. Because its so far removed from money its not even paper, its digits. On a screen.

This becomes relevant real fast when you go look up the price of things like corn. Going back to the 1600’s when the only money was silver and gold coin the price of a bushel of corn was the same all the way from the Pilgrims to the Civil War. Oh there were blips. But DYODD. Look it up. The blips were all brief and mostly due to.... wars. They’d print paper money to pay the troops to fight the wars. Sound familiar?

Only now the wars go on forever.

Human beings however are really clever. Someone makes something better they make a nice profit. Better, or cheaper. Or both. The profit motive is strong as can be and so someone somewhere is always striving to make a buck by making something cheaper and better. Economists call this productivity.

Productivity is always going up. Computers sent it rocketing up crazy fast. Everything should be so much better today no one would even think for a second to ask Eric’s question. It would be so obvious.

The reason its not is because we’ve all been deluded into thinking of the USD as a sound basis for measuring over time. Day to day, fine. But over the years? Has it somehow escaped your attention we used to measure dollars in thousands, now its trillions? Going on quadrillions? How on Earth is that a stable measure?

Meanwhile, another simple exercise, instead of dollars go look at the price of things in ounces of gold. Or silver. The gallon of gas that used to be a dime STILL IS- IF you sell your SILVER dime for FRNs. The best mens $50 suit STILL IS but only if paid in the same ounce of gold, now $1500 when priced in FRNs.

You can do this with all kinds of things. OF COURSE your dollar buys a lot more today. Your DOLLAR. NOT your Federal Reserve Note.