>> but overall unimportant sense I can't overstate how much i disagree that it's unimportant. But first, let me try to steel-man your argument further. It'd be

>> but overall unimportant sense I can't overstate how much i disagree that it's unimportant. But first, let me try to steel-man your argument further. It'd be that fiscal freedom doesn't actually solve the harder problem. The harder problem being allocating finite real resources in the economy. To build upon your "i had to lose $x so that the government could spend $x on something other than my own needs": Let's say for example, your needs were to buy the only remaining steel available for your construction project but the government would also like that steel for their project. We've reached an impasse, so we still need to calibrate public spending with what the economy can produce. All spending, public or private, carries inflation risk but the problem here is that without the invisible hand, you've sleep walked into a planned economy with the entirely obvious and predictable result that you have broken it - your economy can no longer produce enough steel. So there's no free lunch to be had here and further, you risk catastrophically unsettling a complex system that kinda mostly works. It's not that by meddling with how things work, you risk a bump in the economy. Instead the risk is some kind of disequilibrium, a snap away to a self-reinforcing runaway feedback loop that totally destroys the economy. So don't fiddle with big things that we don't really fully understand. Decent steel man attempt? I'm still learning in this space, critique wholeheartedly invited. Now to why i disagree with your assertion that it's unimportant. Quick recap - you can't beat inflation, when that alarm bell rings you have to redirect public spending, you might also want to encourage private spending to redirect too (the role of taxation, i.e. destroying privately held dollars) but that's a policy decision for the government of the time. What you CAN do, is spend on things that aren't at capacity. And there's a LOT of unused capacity in the economy. Want to pay some nurses to fix up some long term sick workers to get them productive again? Go for it. The public good doesn't always align with profit. Outbidding your luxury condo's steel to build a hospital is a contrived example but the demand-pull invisible hand still exists, it's just no longer omnipotent. Supply side economics will still attract steel making capacity in that example. The market and its prices are still the primary signal. Edited: many times.