Freezy on Nostr: If one believes societal issues can be solved by money printing, there is an infinite ...
If one believes societal issues can be solved by money printing, there is an infinite amount of excuses to kick on the printer. Urgency reaches from "Let's flip each cobblestone around, so they get worn down evenly" to "The I AM LEGEND virus is here & my cousin turned into a zombie, pls fix". But the level of importance of a societal issue doesn't change the money printer's incapability to create wealth. It can only (ineffectively) redistribute it.
No- & precoiners often give an example of pressing societal issues such as climate change or a respirative infection & stress that an issue of such importance can only be solved by money printing. Of course, it can't .. well .. you can address and probably even solve specific issues more quickly by redistributing society's resources to a specific niche via money printing, but hereby you drain resources from other parts of society that don't receive the blessing of the money hose.
Thus, I think the real clash of beliefs is about how society's limited resources should be allocated. By the free market (everybody spending, saving & investing their money how they see fit) or by a group of experts that appropriate it by money printing and direct it onto what they believe to be the most pressing issue. Personally, I suspect the former approach to be more effective.
But many people struggle with the concept of 'You can't create wealth by money printing', especially if faced with a crisis. I think it's largely due to the complexity of today's monetary system and thus I like to simplify things when being faced with the "But how can we solve X, if not by the government printing money?".
Imagine a population of a few people living on an island. Each person has some savings in the form of fruits, fish & other stuff. They have also developed a primitive form of credit money where they have a large piece of bark that functions as a ledger. When they exchange goods for money, they update the ledger by scratching the new account balances onto the bark. One day a horrible storm blows half of the population's papayas and smoked fish into the ocean. The people of the island freak out. All that hard work, all those savings .. gone. And that too at the beginning of autumn, when fewer fish can be caught .. no doubt an existential crisis. Luckily they come up with a plan. They gather in awe in front of their piece of bark & scratch 5 additional markings behind each name. Cheerfully they congratulate each other on how much more wealthy they've become. And they are confident that the newfound wealth will get them through the winter.
Unfortunately, half of them starve to death, as scratching a bunch of markings onto a piece of bark doesn't create actual wealth. The same of course also applies to adding a bunch of zeroes in a bunch of 'excel files' to people who are on good terms with the central bank and who are believed to be the saviours of the current crisis.
#bitcoin
No- & precoiners often give an example of pressing societal issues such as climate change or a respirative infection & stress that an issue of such importance can only be solved by money printing. Of course, it can't .. well .. you can address and probably even solve specific issues more quickly by redistributing society's resources to a specific niche via money printing, but hereby you drain resources from other parts of society that don't receive the blessing of the money hose.
Thus, I think the real clash of beliefs is about how society's limited resources should be allocated. By the free market (everybody spending, saving & investing their money how they see fit) or by a group of experts that appropriate it by money printing and direct it onto what they believe to be the most pressing issue. Personally, I suspect the former approach to be more effective.
But many people struggle with the concept of 'You can't create wealth by money printing', especially if faced with a crisis. I think it's largely due to the complexity of today's monetary system and thus I like to simplify things when being faced with the "But how can we solve X, if not by the government printing money?".
Imagine a population of a few people living on an island. Each person has some savings in the form of fruits, fish & other stuff. They have also developed a primitive form of credit money where they have a large piece of bark that functions as a ledger. When they exchange goods for money, they update the ledger by scratching the new account balances onto the bark. One day a horrible storm blows half of the population's papayas and smoked fish into the ocean. The people of the island freak out. All that hard work, all those savings .. gone. And that too at the beginning of autumn, when fewer fish can be caught .. no doubt an existential crisis. Luckily they come up with a plan. They gather in awe in front of their piece of bark & scratch 5 additional markings behind each name. Cheerfully they congratulate each other on how much more wealthy they've become. And they are confident that the newfound wealth will get them through the winter.
Unfortunately, half of them starve to death, as scratching a bunch of markings onto a piece of bark doesn't create actual wealth. The same of course also applies to adding a bunch of zeroes in a bunch of 'excel files' to people who are on good terms with the central bank and who are believed to be the saviours of the current crisis.
#bitcoin