It typically doesn't work much for individuals as the frequently lack good data, disposable cash or credit, and stockpiling capabilities.

Businesses can do this through warehousing or futures contracts -- going long or short on a commodity (price rise or fall respectively). Especially fuels (Southwest Airlines has famously done this to good effect repeatedly during oil price spikes).

I also think that this may affect business investment more than consumer spending. I remain hazy on this element of economics.

Thank you for being the only reasonable person in this thread.

That argument -- that people would defer consumption forever -- is the craziest thing in the world, and every economist and wannabe economist seem to take it without question.

It's nice to be regarded as reasonable.

My question, one to which I have not been able to find an answer, is:

   Is this questionable premise (I'm not quite willing to call it crazy, 
   but it is non-obvious) the entire basis for all of monetary policy?

Approachable texts about why and how the money supply should be controlled seem hard to find. In conversation, this is the only reason I've ever been given for us to need the Fed to ensure that the money supply grows with the economy.

I've also been looking at and for texts on money. Adam Smith and William Stanley Jevons are two of the earlier significant works. Reading Milton Friedman probably has value. Keynes as well.

Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money is a well-received popular work on money, trade, and exchange.

(NB: I'm not particularly well-disposed toward either Friedman or Ferguson.)

The answer is yes, and the lack of clear statements confirming it shows that economists feel that it is a stupid idea but they go a long way to hide that from themselves.