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The value of money is not artificial, it's valued through a measurement of it's availability vis-a-vis other resources and opportunities. Surely countries can

The value of money is not artificial, it's valued through a measurement of it's availability vis-a-vis other resources and opportunities. Surely countries can invest more if those projects are 'more value creating than other investments' and if it's rational, but the notion that countries shouldn't be afraid of debt either is pragmatically no helpful. All of us are just a few irresponsible financial decisions away from being Greece, Venezuela, Weimar etc.. Stable fiat currencies are a precarious thing, which why we are so cold and 'small c' conservative about it. As for Germany's problems, it has to do with how we measure value, institutional legacy, and obviously unwillingness to consider Nuclear. Merkel was never really a pragmatist in the sense we would understand it - she was a political pragmatist, meaning really just 'populist' but more of the centrist type: I believe her Nuclear decision was mostly political.

cygx 7y ago
Of course it's artificial. However, that doesn't mean it's arbitrary, or useless, or can be ignored at will given the current system of socio-economic organization. You're absolutely right that in the world we live in, policy makers have to be careful about financial decisions, or suffer the consequences. But I believe people should be reminded from time to time that our world is pretty far from the best possible one: There's no particularly good reason that a child has to die from undernutrition every couple of minutes, that fusion research stagnated due to lack of funding, that people go bankrupt to pay for healthcare, etc. As a species, we're just too stupid and greedy to do any better...