For one, you could simply hand the pile of cash out to the first person who comes by your window. Or you might hand small amounts of cash to a bunch of diffe

For one, you could simply hand the pile of cash out to the first person who comes by your window. Or you might hand small amounts of cash to a bunch of different people. Both of these seem like nice things to do. But then you wonder: what if the cash in your living room is counterfeit? More to the point — does it even matter? Wherever the money came from, if you dump it through the window, you'll be helping a few people, but at the same time causing inflation that will hurt everyone else. The key issue with this entire blog post is that it ignores the distribution of wealth within the hypothetical Congolese market. What if one person in the marketplace has 99% of the money, and everybody else has the rest evenly divided between them. Then under some moral/ethical frameworks it might be beneficial to distribute the money evenly to the rest of the population at the cost of inflating away some of the single rich person's wealth. What you do with the money affects the distribution of wealth & goods within the society. What is a good distribution? You need a moral/ethical framework to decide. I won't make an assumption on which one we go with, but lets say we go with one. Not spending or donating the money is making the choice that the distribution of wealth as it currently exists is the most optimal. Is this just? Depends on your moral/ethical framework. Saying that earning is good and spending is bad is overly simplistic. You need an objective function on the distribution of wealth. Earning money in a way that warps the distribution away from the ideal can then be considered bad (and thus should be 'corrected' via taxation and other methods) and spending money in a way that warps the distribution toward the ideal can be considered good and should be rewarded (via tax credits etcetera).