jcwit said:
I remember the days when one could buy .303 enfields for $10.00, Jungle Carbines for $15.00.
Today those should be in the $75 to $100 dollar range.
It was not because that was the price of that firearm, but rather because they were surplus.
To get that surplus required an empire upgrading to something else, and involved mass production for World Wars were many people died, were rationed, and generally had a lower quality of life.
Would you trade another World War for some cheap surplus some decades down the road?
The reason you don't have similarly inexpensive modern surplus is because of legislation. Legislation prevents civilians from being given select fire rifles.
Select fire rifles have been the standard for half a century, so civilians can no longer have such surplus dropped on them like in prior generations.
Instead the government destroys it, sells it to other governments, or gives or nearly permanently 'loans' (due to legal technicalities) it to other government forces like federal and local law enforcement agencies.
Many police departments have received retired m16s for around that price. If it was legal for civilians to have them you may have received them too.
I can assure you that after the end of the Cold War there was a lot of 'excess' that would have been just as inexpensive as those Enfields adjusted for inflation.
Clinton had nearly almost a million m14's destroyed, those would have been among the flood of surplus.
Similar quantities of USGI 1911 pistols were destroyed, due to legislation and politics, and those were legal for civilians to own.
A lot of m3s, Thompsons, and other guns stockpiled in armories were similarly destroyed.
You could probably have had a surplus M3 for under $25.
Then there is all sorts of import laws now in place preventing even semi-auto surplus from freely flowing into the nation like it used to be able to. You have 'sporting purpose' restrictions, 922(r), bans on Chinese guns, or Russian handgun imports, points systems handguns imported must meet, and loads of other crap that reduces the foreign surplus market available in the USA.
So no,
the difference is not inflation and cost of the arm, but politics and legal reasons you do not see the market saturated with retired more modern surplus like it was in the 1950s and 60s.
jcwit said:
I also remember buying gas in the '50's/60's for $ .16 cents a gal. So gas should be $1.25 a gal today, something happened.
It was on par with that in the 1990s into the early 2000s. Gas cost under $1 without the new additional state and federal taxes placed on it. There was new road taxes at the federal level on fuel, and states that previously didn't tax fuel at all have now uniformly began taxing it by the gallon. Some much more than others.
Taxes on fuel in 2009:
It has now of course skyrocketed in cost beyond these taxes or inflation.
