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> Of course, people who have no moral principles about transfer payments (as long as they are transfer payments to themselves) support it. Aren't all democrati

• rhelz 2y ago
  // Aren't all democratic elections about electing the person who will transfer wealth into the voters' hands? // Interesting question. Consider, for example, Eisenhower's building the interstate highway system, which boosted the productivity of the entire nation. Or the Apollo space program, which yielded back somewhere between 5 and 7 dollars for every dollar spent, by creating new technologies and whole new industries. Contrast with the bitcoin reserve. Every dollar spent goes from the pockets of the taxpayers to the pockets of the bitcoin sellers, without doing anything to boost productivity, to create new technology, etc. // That's what it means to hold an appreciating hard asset relative to fiat, in my opinion. Well, bitcoin is not hard asset (it is created by consensus, and it has no intrinsic material form) nor is it intrinsically appreciating. It could be outlawed, have a flat tax imposed on it, or become obsoleted by, say, quantum computers. But let's grant, for sake of argument, that in the long run, relative to puny fiat currencies like the dollar (which is merely backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S.) the price of bitcoin will generally keep increasing, due to inflation of the various fiat currencies. You may very well be able to sell your bitcoin for nominally higher prices, but in constant dollars, if you add up every bitcoin transaction from its inception to infinity, the total amount of dollars will still be zero. // Taxpayer money is a bit of a smokescreen in my opinion. However you want to phrase it, if we create a trillion-dollar bitcoin reserve, that trillion dollars has to come from somewhere. There's no such thing as a magic money-generating machine. End of the day, wealth comes from the productivity of laborers. If you spend money to increase their productivity, total wealth increases. If you just shuffle your money back and forth between gold and bitcoin, that does nothing to increase anybody's productivity. // think all voters have no qualms about transfer payments // Certainly, not enough voters have qualms about transfer payments. But morality is just for suckers, right?
  • noch 2y ago
    > There's no such thing as a magic money-generating machine. Banks literally print bank reserves out of nothing. It's one of the more hilarious aspects of modern economics.
    • rhelz 2y ago
      chuckle that's true :) But it only happens when somebody borrows money, and somebody only borrows money if they think they can use that money to make even more money---i.e. improve their productivity. E.g. somebody might borrow money to buy a McDonald's franchise. Now the nation can produce more burgers. It's really weird how banks do that, but it's not magic.
      • NomDePlum 2y ago
        Banks printing money means the burger is more expensive for everyone who uses the denomination that the bank printed money for surely? It increases cost and consequently reduces the incentive to produce outputs? So less incentive to produce, but if produced the result is a more expensive burger would be my read on this. Happy to hear why you think it's different.
        • rhelz 2y ago
          Because it doesn't just increase the supply of money--it increases the supply of burgers as well :-) Sure, the money is created out of thin air. But that money gets invested in things which actually increase productivity and increase the GDP. E.G. a factory borrows money to buy new machines, which makes their workers more productive. If the increasing money supply does start to cause excess inflation, the Fed tamps it down by increasing the interest rates. From Volker to Covid, it did a remarkably good job of keeping the inflation under 2%. Plague and unfunded tax cuts have pushed that up closer to 3%, but it is dropping.
          • NomDePlum 2y ago
            Are there any stats that burger availability increased? My observation is that quality, affordability and availability of burgers have went down whilst price has increased since 2008, the date I became aware of th use of printing money. I attribute this to the printed money being kept to a large degree by banks instead of going into the wider economy. Most of that money has led to increases in housing stock value/cost and subsequently unavoidable cost to most, than contributing to the wider economy. I'm not in the US so maybe have a different experience from yourself, but printing money has largely just devalued money and decreased wages as opposed to ending up benefitting burger availability :-)