9 ms·

This entire article is a conflation of two orthogonal arguments: 1. Austrian economics is right, Keynsian is wrong. 2. Central banks are introducing ledger ba

by rswail 6y ago

This entire article is a conflation of two orthogonal arguments: 1. Austrian economics is right, Keynsian is wrong. 2. Central banks are introducing ledger based currencies to increase surveillance of consumers, using the strawman argument about China. On 1), the pandemic has shown that government spending works to keep an economy from failing. The old inflation argument has been proven completely false. If anything, what has been proven is that a greater distribution of wealth is needed as Amazon and online wholesale and retail take over. The boom in online sales is a superprofit, driven by a windfall that government public health measures closed other sales channels. Those profits should be subject to a windfall tax to reduce that concentration. On 2) Central Banks are looking at ledger based currency as a way to allow more distribution channels beyond the existing retail banking network. It allows greater freedom for financial offerings by removing a layer of distribution. In a way, ledger based currencies are the "Amazon" of money distribution by central banks. It allows them to push money out when needed to multiple outlets, while still maintaining regulatory control. If anything, it's a "free but regulated market" at work.

emteycz 6y ago
You know that all the central banks are actually saying themselves they want to track? It's not even a secret, you can read it right on their websites. The EU bank and Commission use China as the example, check it out: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/648784/IPOL_STU(2020)648784_EN.pdf https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/6487...
- erk__ 6y ago
  I am not sure where in the 47 pages you are reading that, I can find that the report is reccomending a european internet like the chinese to have higher growth in EU, and to foster european values "such as democratic values, data protection, data accessibility, transparency and user friendliness." Which I see rather pependicular to what you are saying it is telling. It should also be said that this report is not made by the european union, but for the european union by a 3rd party that got paid to make research for them. What it says, may or may not be influential to the future decicions of the EU.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    > I am not sure where in the 47 pages you are reading that From the document: "An added benefit of the increase in electronic payments is the reduction of shadow economy. Each year trillions of Euro flow in the shadow market unregulated and untaxed, leading to long term deficits. Traceability of electronic payments is much better than with cash, leading to more information on the flow of money. This information can be used to reduce tax evasion and make regulation easier, in turn reducing the shadow economy" > It should also be said that this report is not made by the european union, but for the european union by a 3rd party that got paid to make research for them. Signature right on the front page: "Policy Department for Economic, Scientific and Quality of Life Policies Directorate-General for Internal Policies." This "third-party document" shit is a really embarrassing excuse. Can't the EU apologists think of something better? Maybe someone external cooperated on that document - but it's still a document by the EU and for the EU just like any other, authored and published by a department of the Directorate-General for Internal Policies of the EU. I am sure they wouldn't have signed and published it if they disagreed with the content (or at least would have said so). You wouldn't try to claim that a law/regulation written by an external lawyer and published by the EU is actually not an EU document, right? Because there is a lot of that, e.g. the GDPR. From the document: "The study lays out predictions for digital services in the next one to ten years and provides recommendations for action for the European Parliament in preparation for the Digital Services Act. This document was provided by the Policy Department for Economic, Scientific and Quality of Life Policies at the request of the committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection." Anyways, this document is one of many, it's just the first I had a link to. The same points (and other, even more concerning ones) are made in many more. > "such as democratic values, data protection, data accessibility, transparency and user friendliness." Sure, just like the encryption backdoors are for the children, for the democracy and especially for transparency. Take these democratic values with you, I am not interested. The EU is really efficient in showing us why is democracy wrong.
    - erk__ 6y ago
      > From the document: "An added benefit of the increase in electronic payments is the reduction of shadow economy. Each year trillions of Euro flow in the shadow market unregulated and untaxed, leading to long term deficits. Traceability of electronic payments is much better than with cash, leading to more information on the flow of money. This information can be used to reduce tax evasion and make regulation easier, in turn reducing the shadow economy" That is an observation, not a policy thought up by politicians working at the Parliment. >This "third-party document" shit is a really embarrassing excuse. Can't the EU apologists think of something better? It is a study for politicians to take better decicions not policies to be implemented, for that you want to read the things like the meeting minutes not supporting analysis. >Anyways, this document is one of many, it's just the first I had a link to. The same points (and other, even more concerning ones) are made in many more. I would welcome linking to more, as long as they are not just studies, although interesting reading they do not dictate the policy. >Sure, just like the encryption backdoors are for the children, for the democracy and especially for transparency. Take these democratic values with you, I am not interested. The EU is really efficient in showing us why is democracy wrong. Well I am also welcoming more information about this as it sounds like something I want to read up on. The EU may be inefficient, and it could be a lot better, which is why I would welcome a discussion about it instead of making accusations without providing any sources to base your claims on.
sanderjd 6y ago
For #2, what is the actual technical hurdle to more widespread distribution? I saw an idea that every citizen should just automatically have a checking account at their regional Fed. Why not that? It does not seem technically infeasible, and the fed could then do distribution by debiting their own accounts.
- javajosh 6y ago
  It is fun to speculate about this, because money is fundamentally information - imagine that a dollar is a "like". The most fundamental hurtle to distribution is that people don't wanna! When you have a bunch of likes, giving them away sounds like a good idea, but in reality it means a) reducing your own value (unfairly), and b) increasing someone else's value (unfairly). I personally have another solution, that I've never heard articulated, which I call "The Enough Number". It's a number you individually decide is enough for you, after which you will choose not to work any further (at least, not for money). This achieves a kind of de facto redistribution since, theoretically, someone else will step in to make the money the retiree is no longer making. Another way to put it is that it creates an artificial scarcity of competence, or it means that competence-for-hire decays over time in a way that is beneficial to society. The only way for this to work, IMHO, is if you get some social status at Davos (free VIP entry for life? A medal?) for having a achieved Enough. Or maybe a publisher can arise, called "Enough Press" where such people can get a book deal. FWIW my own Enough Number is $10M. This is still quite high but it reflects my upper-middle class sensibilities. This would be enough for a beautiful 1500 ft^2 house in Laguna Beach, a 30' wooden sailboat I partner on with a couple of neighbors, and I'd probably spend my time teaching neighborhood kids how to program and make things in a beautiful, sunny space filled with all kinds of very cool and dangerous components. Politically, this helps focus me on the desired outcome, where the Earth is populated by people who routinely achieve Enough at 30, and spend most of their lives raising their kids, traveling, telling stories, eating good food, reading and writing. The really duty driven folk would find longer-term work at the EPA or the Justice Department or on space projects, etc. I would expect intellectuals to have the easiest time of it, because they could become adjunct professors. Celebrities and business people would struggle, I think, because the attention is the juice, and you can't every really have Enough!
WA 6y ago
On 1: I think the final judgment is yet to be made. We don’t know how many businesses will keep going for how long and if there is just a delay in bankruptcies. Also, inflation in consumer goods can show delayed as well. And assets are already inflated. It’s a bit too early to say with confidence, that the stimulus prevented the economy from failing.
throw0101a 6y ago
> 1. Austrian economics is right, Keynsian is wrong. At this point in history, how can anyone claim that Keynesianism is "wrong"? > I would summarize the Keynesian view in terms of four points: > 1. Economies sometimes produce much less than they could, and employ many fewer workers than they should, because there just isn’t enough spending. Such episodes can happen for a variety of reasons; the question is how to respond. > 2. There are normally forces that tend to push the economy back toward full employment. But they work slowly; a hands-off policy toward depressed economies means accepting a long, unnecessary period of pain. > 3. It is often possible to drastically shorten this period of pain and greatly reduce the human and financial losses by “printing money”, using the central bank’s power of currency creation to push interest rates down. > 4. Sometimes, however, monetary policy loses its effectiveness, especially when rates are close to zero. In that case temporary deficit spending can provide a useful boost. And conversely, fiscal austerity in a depressed economy imposes large economic losses. * https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/keynesianism-explained/ https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/keynesianism-ex... I'm sure that there are nuances in the model that can be more or less accurate, but the idea that (aggregate) demand drives economic activity, and that (central bank) interest rates and government (stimulus) spending effects economic activity seems fairly certain. Especially with everything we've seen over the last ~20 years: Fed-driven US real estate bubble, post-2008 economic recovery, lack of inflation due to low/zero rates even with lots of "printing money", austerity caused economic slowdowns (in the EU). It's been one giant economics petri dish of experiments. How has Keynesianism failed? Non-K folks were predicting all sorts of problem, and yet the Ks were saying 'it'll be fine': > We believe the Federal Reserve's large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called "quantitative easing") should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed's objective of promoting employment. * https://economics21.org/html/open-letter-ben-bernanke-287.html https://economics21.org/html/open-letter-ben-bernanke-287.ht...
- solatic 6y ago
  Like most of Krugman's blogs, he's over-simplifying for a mass audience. Full-employment is very easy to achieve for the government, if that is the government's only goal. Create artificial demand for ditches to be dug, and then hire people to dig those ditches. The fundamental question is not how to generate artificial demand, but how to generate artificial demand that succeeds at generating useful value. Now, that spectrum has a range of answers. Sometimes you don't really care about value, or you take value on faith, e.g. when constructing public infrastructure works. They put people to work, get people spending, and everyone agrees that the country is in dire need of infrastructure improvements right now. There are, however, two non-infrastructure extremes: a) spending money on strong companies that will become stronger (instead of failing due to temporary unavoidable circumstances), but if anyone knew for sure which companies these were, the government wouldn't need to spend any money at all, investors would step in and pocket the profits. Then there's b) spending money on weak companies that would've failed in a year or two anyway, and emergency bailouts only forestalls the inevitable, wasting money and time and creative potential for nothing. Now most companies are on a spectrum, which means that the strategy of such wide-spectrum spending is to offset the losses of boosting weak companies with the gains made by strong companies, overall. Will it work at generating (net) useful value? Maybe. If so, then the currency is tied up in the extra value generated, and we'll avoid inflation. If not, then we have far more currency in circulation for the same amount of value, and prices will go up in tandem. Jury's still out.
sunshinerag 6y ago
1. is not settled yet. we are yet to see how all this spending is going to be paid for.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I assume like it always has been, with a reduction in value of the currency relative to assets.
  - Traster 6y ago
    Isn’t that... inflation
    - tehlike 6y ago
      Sadly, not directly. Assets inflation != Inflation
      - sunshinerag 6y ago
        >> Assets inflation != Inflation why?
        MacsHeadroom 6y ago
        Because the Fed measures inflation by CPI. The price of gas and groceries. Nothing makes for a more unstable economy than a working class who can't afford food and mobility.
        sunshinerag 6y ago
        Ah, so the Fed does not measure house price rises, mortgage payment increases as inflation. if a person becomes homeless as they can't afford shelter there is still no inflation as per CPI.
        6y ago
seibelj 6y ago
Giving people money for nothing is not providing value for effort. This is doomed to fail. Every single extra dollar printed is pure inflation rather than wealth creation. All of the things people really want inflate while marginal crappy goods decline in quality and remain affordable. Housing, quality education, childcare, high quality food (think Whole Foods), good clothing and shoes - all of this stuff gets more expensive. If a UBI is ever implemented we will have a vast underclass of people barely surviving despite their “free money” and the wealthy will continue to get ever wealthier.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  > If a UBI is ever implemented we will have a vast underclass of people barely surviving despite their “free money” and the wealthy will continue to get ever wealthier. That’s why there would need to be a wealth/income tax to redistribute in order to provide the UBI in the first place.
  - razius 6y ago
    Isn't that communism?
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      I don’t know enough about various -isms, but I would posit there is some space between “redistributing all wealth and no individual benefits” and “every man for himself”.
    - pretendscholar 6y ago
      Lol this is your brain on compsci vocational training.
ethn 6y ago
Right now many central banks and countries, especially the US are actually exercising a third economic philosophy: monetarism (which the federal reserve board members are historically staunch supporters of)[1]. 1. https://www.clevelandfed.org/en/newsroom-and-events/speeches/sp-20120402-the-fed-and-the-economy-lessons-from-milton-friedman.aspx https://www.clevelandfed.org/en/newsroom-and-events/speeches...
I_am_tiberius 6y ago
On 1) How can you say the inflation argument has been proven wrong? Since the financial crisis in 2008 houses in Austria have more than doubled in prices. I find your arguments very naive. You entirely ignore the misuse of governmental power - history has shown us. Also please consider that increasing the money supply steals money (the value of money) from everyone's checking account over the long term. At the same time consider that QE money is not retrieved by the people who need it most (see cantillon effect).
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >houses in Austria have more than doubled in prices Inflation measures the general price level in the economy (in the form of a basket of goods), not the prices of individual commodities. The inflation in Austria has been at a steady 1-3%[1] over the last decade, roughly in line with inflation targets. Housing prices have risen, like in many other regions, due to a lack of supply of housing in the market, not changes in the money supply. These vague rants about governmental power are exactly what makes it to read any of these Mises articles with a straight face, it is nothing else but libertarian ideology. [1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/375291/inflation-rate-in-austria/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/375291/inflation-rate-in...
  - I_am_tiberius 6y ago
    >Housing prices have risen, like in many other regions, due to a lack of supply of housing in the market, not changes in the money supply. Don't you think demand/supply is strongly impacted by the actions taken by the FED or ECB (eg interests - since 2008 it's difficult to find better investment objects than real estate or Gold in order to retain the asset's value - loans are pretty cheap). >These vague rants about governmental power are exactly what makes it to read any of these Mises articles with a straight face, it is nothing else but libertarian ideology. Does that mean you are sure the government won't use interest rates as a mean for controlling the economy? Wouldn't you feel very bad when being forced to spend your money in order to not be punished with negative interest rates? Without cash you won't even be able to escape. Negative interest rates are just one example. I'm sure that this is happening if we don't act. I can't see why you consider such things vague rants.

by rswail 6y ago

emteycz 6y ago

You know that all the central banks are actually saying themselves they want to track? It's not even a secret, you can read it right on their websites. The EU bank and Commission use China as the example, check it out: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/648784/IPOL_STU(2020)648784_EN.pdf https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/6487...

erk__ 6y ago
I am not sure where in the 47 pages you are reading that, I can find that the report is reccomending a european internet like the chinese to have higher growth in EU, and to foster european values "such as democratic values, data protection, data accessibility, transparency and user friendliness." Which I see rather pependicular to what you are saying it is telling. It should also be said that this report is not made by the european union, but for the european union by a 3rd party that got paid to make research for them. What it says, may or may not be influential to the future decicions of the EU.
- emteycz 6y ago
  > I am not sure where in the 47 pages you are reading that From the document: "An added benefit of the increase in electronic payments is the reduction of shadow economy. Each year trillions of Euro flow in the shadow market unregulated and untaxed, leading to long term deficits. Traceability of electronic payments is much better than with cash, leading to more information on the flow of money. This information can be used to reduce tax evasion and make regulation easier, in turn reducing the shadow economy" > It should also be said that this report is not made by the european union, but for the european union by a 3rd party that got paid to make research for them. Signature right on the front page: "Policy Department for Economic, Scientific and Quality of Life Policies Directorate-General for Internal Policies." This "third-party document" shit is a really embarrassing excuse. Can't the EU apologists think of something better? Maybe someone external cooperated on that document - but it's still a document by the EU and for the EU just like any other, authored and published by a department of the Directorate-General for Internal Policies of the EU. I am sure they wouldn't have signed and published it if they disagreed with the content (or at least would have said so). You wouldn't try to claim that a law/regulation written by an external lawyer and published by the EU is actually not an EU document, right? Because there is a lot of that, e.g. the GDPR. From the document: "The study lays out predictions for digital services in the next one to ten years and provides recommendations for action for the European Parliament in preparation for the Digital Services Act. This document was provided by the Policy Department for Economic, Scientific and Quality of Life Policies at the request of the committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection." Anyways, this document is one of many, it's just the first I had a link to. The same points (and other, even more concerning ones) are made in many more. > "such as democratic values, data protection, data accessibility, transparency and user friendliness." Sure, just like the encryption backdoors are for the children, for the democracy and especially for transparency. Take these democratic values with you, I am not interested. The EU is really efficient in showing us why is democracy wrong.
  - erk__ 6y ago
    > From the document: "An added benefit of the increase in electronic payments is the reduction of shadow economy. Each year trillions of Euro flow in the shadow market unregulated and untaxed, leading to long term deficits. Traceability of electronic payments is much better than with cash, leading to more information on the flow of money. This information can be used to reduce tax evasion and make regulation easier, in turn reducing the shadow economy" That is an observation, not a policy thought up by politicians working at the Parliment. >This "third-party document" shit is a really embarrassing excuse. Can't the EU apologists think of something better? It is a study for politicians to take better decicions not policies to be implemented, for that you want to read the things like the meeting minutes not supporting analysis. >Anyways, this document is one of many, it's just the first I had a link to. The same points (and other, even more concerning ones) are made in many more. I would welcome linking to more, as long as they are not just studies, although interesting reading they do not dictate the policy. >Sure, just like the encryption backdoors are for the children, for the democracy and especially for transparency. Take these democratic values with you, I am not interested. The EU is really efficient in showing us why is democracy wrong. Well I am also welcoming more information about this as it sounds like something I want to read up on. The EU may be inefficient, and it could be a lot better, which is why I would welcome a discussion about it instead of making accusations without providing any sources to base your claims on.

sanderjd 6y ago

For #2, what is the actual technical hurdle to more widespread distribution? I saw an idea that every citizen should just automatically have a checking account at their regional Fed. Why not that? It does not seem technically infeasible, and the fed could then do distribution by debiting their own accounts.

javajosh 6y ago
It is fun to speculate about this, because money is fundamentally information - imagine that a dollar is a "like". The most fundamental hurtle to distribution is that people don't wanna! When you have a bunch of likes, giving them away sounds like a good idea, but in reality it means a) reducing your own value (unfairly), and b) increasing someone else's value (unfairly). I personally have another solution, that I've never heard articulated, which I call "The Enough Number". It's a number you individually decide is enough for you, after which you will choose not to work any further (at least, not for money). This achieves a kind of de facto redistribution since, theoretically, someone else will step in to make the money the retiree is no longer making. Another way to put it is that it creates an artificial scarcity of competence, or it means that competence-for-hire decays over time in a way that is beneficial to society. The only way for this to work, IMHO, is if you get some social status at Davos (free VIP entry for life? A medal?) for having a achieved Enough. Or maybe a publisher can arise, called "Enough Press" where such people can get a book deal. FWIW my own Enough Number is $10M. This is still quite high but it reflects my upper-middle class sensibilities. This would be enough for a beautiful 1500 ft^2 house in Laguna Beach, a 30' wooden sailboat I partner on with a couple of neighbors, and I'd probably spend my time teaching neighborhood kids how to program and make things in a beautiful, sunny space filled with all kinds of very cool and dangerous components. Politically, this helps focus me on the desired outcome, where the Earth is populated by people who routinely achieve Enough at 30, and spend most of their lives raising their kids, traveling, telling stories, eating good food, reading and writing. The really duty driven folk would find longer-term work at the EPA or the Justice Department or on space projects, etc. I would expect intellectuals to have the easiest time of it, because they could become adjunct professors. Celebrities and business people would struggle, I think, because the attention is the juice, and you can't every really have Enough!

WA 6y ago

On 1: I think the final judgment is yet to be made. We don’t know how many businesses will keep going for how long and if there is just a delay in bankruptcies. Also, inflation in consumer goods can show delayed as well. And assets are already inflated. It’s a bit too early to say with confidence, that the stimulus prevented the economy from failing.

throw0101a 6y ago

> 1. Austrian economics is right, Keynsian is wrong. At this point in history, how can anyone claim that Keynesianism is "wrong"? > I would summarize the Keynesian view in terms of four points: > 1. Economies sometimes produce much less than they could, and employ many fewer workers than they should, because there just isn’t enough spending. Such episodes can happen for a variety of reasons; the question is how to respond. > 2. There are normally forces that tend to push the economy back toward full employment. But they work slowly; a hands-off policy toward depressed economies means accepting a long, unnecessary period of pain. > 3. It is often possible to drastically shorten this period of pain and greatly reduce the human and financial losses by “printing money”, using the central bank’s power of currency creation to push interest rates down. > 4. Sometimes, however, monetary policy loses its effectiveness, especially when rates are close to zero. In that case temporary deficit spending can provide a useful boost. And conversely, fiscal austerity in a depressed economy imposes large economic losses. * https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/keynesianism-explained/ https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/keynesianism-ex... I'm sure that there are nuances in the model that can be more or less accurate, but the idea that (aggregate) demand drives economic activity, and that (central bank) interest rates and government (stimulus) spending effects economic activity seems fairly certain. Especially with everything we've seen over the last ~20 years: Fed-driven US real estate bubble, post-2008 economic recovery, lack of inflation due to low/zero rates even with lots of "printing money", austerity caused economic slowdowns (in the EU). It's been one giant economics petri dish of experiments. How has Keynesianism failed? Non-K folks were predicting all sorts of problem, and yet the Ks were saying 'it'll be fine': > We believe the Federal Reserve's large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called "quantitative easing") should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed's objective of promoting employment. * https://economics21.org/html/open-letter-ben-bernanke-287.html https://economics21.org/html/open-letter-ben-bernanke-287.ht...

solatic 6y ago
Like most of Krugman's blogs, he's over-simplifying for a mass audience. Full-employment is very easy to achieve for the government, if that is the government's only goal. Create artificial demand for ditches to be dug, and then hire people to dig those ditches. The fundamental question is not how to generate artificial demand, but how to generate artificial demand that succeeds at generating useful value. Now, that spectrum has a range of answers. Sometimes you don't really care about value, or you take value on faith, e.g. when constructing public infrastructure works. They put people to work, get people spending, and everyone agrees that the country is in dire need of infrastructure improvements right now. There are, however, two non-infrastructure extremes: a) spending money on strong companies that will become stronger (instead of failing due to temporary unavoidable circumstances), but if anyone knew for sure which companies these were, the government wouldn't need to spend any money at all, investors would step in and pocket the profits. Then there's b) spending money on weak companies that would've failed in a year or two anyway, and emergency bailouts only forestalls the inevitable, wasting money and time and creative potential for nothing. Now most companies are on a spectrum, which means that the strategy of such wide-spectrum spending is to offset the losses of boosting weak companies with the gains made by strong companies, overall. Will it work at generating (net) useful value? Maybe. If so, then the currency is tied up in the extra value generated, and we'll avoid inflation. If not, then we have far more currency in circulation for the same amount of value, and prices will go up in tandem. Jury's still out.

sunshinerag 6y ago

1. is not settled yet. we are yet to see how all this spending is going to be paid for.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
I assume like it always has been, with a reduction in value of the currency relative to assets.
- Traster 6y ago
  Isn’t that... inflation
  - tehlike 6y ago
    Sadly, not directly. Assets inflation != Inflation
    - sunshinerag 6y ago
      >> Assets inflation != Inflation why?
      - MacsHeadroom 6y ago
        Because the Fed measures inflation by CPI. The price of gas and groceries. Nothing makes for a more unstable economy than a working class who can't afford food and mobility.
        sunshinerag 6y ago
        Ah, so the Fed does not measure house price rises, mortgage payment increases as inflation. if a person becomes homeless as they can't afford shelter there is still no inflation as per CPI.
        6y ago

seibelj 6y ago

Giving people money for nothing is not providing value for effort. This is doomed to fail. Every single extra dollar printed is pure inflation rather than wealth creation. All of the things people really want inflate while marginal crappy goods decline in quality and remain affordable. Housing, quality education, childcare, high quality food (think Whole Foods), good clothing and shoes - all of this stuff gets more expensive. If a UBI is ever implemented we will have a vast underclass of people barely surviving despite their “free money” and the wealthy will continue to get ever wealthier.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
> If a UBI is ever implemented we will have a vast underclass of people barely surviving despite their “free money” and the wealthy will continue to get ever wealthier. That’s why there would need to be a wealth/income tax to redistribute in order to provide the UBI in the first place.
- razius 6y ago
  Isn't that communism?
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    I don’t know enough about various -isms, but I would posit there is some space between “redistributing all wealth and no individual benefits” and “every man for himself”.
  - pretendscholar 6y ago
    Lol this is your brain on compsci vocational training.

ethn 6y ago

Right now many central banks and countries, especially the US are actually exercising a third economic philosophy: monetarism (which the federal reserve board members are historically staunch supporters of)[1]. 1. https://www.clevelandfed.org/en/newsroom-and-events/speeches/sp-20120402-the-fed-and-the-economy-lessons-from-milton-friedman.aspx https://www.clevelandfed.org/en/newsroom-and-events/speeches...

I_am_tiberius 6y ago

On 1) How can you say the inflation argument has been proven wrong? Since the financial crisis in 2008 houses in Austria have more than doubled in prices. I find your arguments very naive. You entirely ignore the misuse of governmental power - history has shown us. Also please consider that increasing the money supply steals money (the value of money) from everyone's checking account over the long term. At the same time consider that QE money is not retrieved by the people who need it most (see cantillon effect).

Barrin92 6y ago
>houses in Austria have more than doubled in prices Inflation measures the general price level in the economy (in the form of a basket of goods), not the prices of individual commodities. The inflation in Austria has been at a steady 1-3%[1] over the last decade, roughly in line with inflation targets. Housing prices have risen, like in many other regions, due to a lack of supply of housing in the market, not changes in the money supply. These vague rants about governmental power are exactly what makes it to read any of these Mises articles with a straight face, it is nothing else but libertarian ideology. [1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/375291/inflation-rate-in-austria/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/375291/inflation-rate-in...
- I_am_tiberius 6y ago
  >Housing prices have risen, like in many other regions, due to a lack of supply of housing in the market, not changes in the money supply. Don't you think demand/supply is strongly impacted by the actions taken by the FED or ECB (eg interests - since 2008 it's difficult to find better investment objects than real estate or Gold in order to retain the asset's value - loans are pretty cheap). >These vague rants about governmental power are exactly what makes it to read any of these Mises articles with a straight face, it is nothing else but libertarian ideology. Does that mean you are sure the government won't use interest rates as a mean for controlling the economy? Wouldn't you feel very bad when being forced to spend your money in order to not be punished with negative interest rates? Without cash you won't even be able to escape. Negative interest rates are just one example. I'm sure that this is happening if we don't act. I can't see why you consider such things vague rants.