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No. It’s worth $10 because you saved your (non-inflationary) money. And you spent the last 10 years making a bread robot instead of working in the financial sec
by jl2718 6y ago
No. It’s worth $10 because you saved your (non-inflationary) money. And you spent the last 10 years making a bread robot instead of working in the financial sector.
And how is ‘investing’ a productive use of capital? In deflationary regime, business is about cash flow. Inflationary regime investments are all speculation, and everybody has to play the game.
This Keynesian argument comes from a nihilistic disregard for social structures, the environment, and future generations. Look him up. “In the long run, we’ll all be dead” - Keynes
- karpierz 6y agoInvesting is a productive use of cash. Cash is a token that represents the goods produced to earn it. You can redeem it for goods, or lend it to someone if they can make better use of it. If they can make better use of it now, you make a deal that they'll give you more of these tokens later. If you hold onto cash, it does nothing. If you invest it, either directly, or by giving it to another entity to invest on your behalf (IE, a chequeing account at a bank or mutual fund), it allows someone else to make use of it, and in exchange, you will be repaid with more cash in the future.
- noahtallen 6y agoIf in a deflationary environment people hold onto their money, then there will be less spending. That means less business income. That means small business close, and big businesses hire less people. That means people get less money, which leads to less spending, etc. If we want to have something like UBI to take care of income instead of work, that still comes from tax dollars, which relies on economic activity (capital gains from investment, income tax, sales tax, etc). In other words, less economic activity has specific impact on real world people and how much money they can get. It’s not just about investing, not just about billionaires.
- imtringued 6y agoWhen you earn money in 1800 and use it in 2021 then a baker in 1800 failed to get your money and his time was wasted. He could have used that time to bake bread but you didn't buy bread. Now that it is 2021 you are asking the baker to bake twice as much bread for your sake even though you did nothing to help the baker run his business. In fact, you did the opposite. Turns out there are less bakers in the future and your money becomes worthless anyway. >This Keynesian argument comes from a nihilistic disregard for social structures, the environment, and future generations. Look him up. “In the long run, we’ll all be dead” - Keynes Is this supposed to be a joke? How are old people becoming rich through no work, no productive investment whatsoever supposed to help future generations? Future generations receive greater incomes than their previous generations thanks to inflation. With deflation they receive lower incomes than their previous generations. When you own deflationary money and you do nothing with it you basically create a claim to future work in the past. By working at a simple 1800s job you have created a claim to the labor of someone working a software job even though you took no part in enabling that job to exist in the first place. Same with the bread baker robot. By holding onto the currency you never created an economic environment that enabled such an investment to be made. You just held onto the currency and once someone was foolish enough to build the robot you obtained a claim to its productivity.
- jl2718 6y agoThese are all valid arguments in the extreme. As are all arguments about inflation in the extreme. There is actually no difference between inflation and deflation. For every inflationary asset basis, there is a deflationary asset basis. Flip bread/money in your own text and you see the problem. The only difference is taxes. Tax basis could be anything. Let’s say, SHA-256 hashes. Every year, the hash value of your dollar investment account quadruples. You need to pay for half of those gains, or else you go to jail, and if you resist, you can be legally killed. The price of food and shelter is irrelevant to me. Pay me. Can’t? Okay, we’ll collect tax in Bitcoin, but we’ll have to raise the tax rate to 90%. We can go back and forth on this as much as you want. In the end, I guarantee the guy with the legal right to kill you ends up owning everything. In conclusion: inflation and deflation are both the same thing, and they both suck.