We should stop all taxation and use inflation to pay for everything instead. Much simpler and no one can get out of it.
As a simple example, consider owning a house vs. renting. If you own the house, the actual number doesn't matter. If you're renting, the ratio between rent and salary is highly critical for your lifestyle.
How many 70s government housing project apartments or leaky rural shacks do you think you'd need to combine to get one working set of appliances and utilities that every section 8 apartment and double wide trailer has these days? (I'd put that number at 3-5). That was the floor then. That floor is mostly the subfloor now.
As things get better our standards get higher. Progress is good but you will never "solve" poverty, destitution, or any other bad thing that is defined relative to the rest of the population.
A loose monetary policy (a la NMT or Keynes) also needs taxation in order to destroy currency. Currency works in a loop. Governments/issuers make USD and pay for stuff (UBI, etc). The currency must complete its life cycle by returning home. It's circulation that makes currency currency.
Without taxation, we'd have currency collapse, not inflation. Printing money without sufficient taxation, we have what we're seeing currently: asset value inflation.
Also, I think we're beginning to understand that "general inflation" isn't really a thing. The price of investable assets isn't connected to the price of consumable goods. Wealth disparities are a big part of this. In theory, if Jeff Bezos and such tried to spend their earnings... we'd have inflation. But when personal income and CG is measured in billions, it's basically impossible to actually consume as much as you earn.
I don't agree with this. The "truly wealthy" don't have any magic recipes that are better long-term than just MSCI World ETF or similar
> As a simple example, consider owning a house vs. renting. If you own the house, the actual number doesn't matter. If you're renting, the ratio between rent and salary is highly critical for your lifestyle.
If there is inflation you don't feel it as a renter either, because your salary and the rent both increase in lockstep (and in many countries, rent increases once in contract are tied to inflation)
where? definitely not in china or india. not in france, the UK or germany either
You just buy assets, like stocks, gold, property, etc.
Realistically we need a private debt jubilee - inflation is just one way to get there.
This doesn't work, however, because with very high planned inflation no one wants to use your currency, and without taxation there's no reason they have to.
That's generally not true - it's not the case in the US (https://mises.org/wire/use-us-dollars-mandatory-united-state...) or the EU (https://ec.europa.eu/info/business-economy-euro/euro-area/eu...).
It is impractical in most places of course, but only because there isn't much demand for it, so it's hard to get bank accounts, contracts or purchases denominated in foreign currencies. Companies and individuals are free to do so, but they don't because using the predominant local currency is useful and convenient for everybody (usually).
The places where using foreign tender is illegal or tightly controlled are generally places where they have huge problems with inflation of their primary currency, like Venezuela.
Venezuela is an illustrative example of the original point here: in practice, if you make your official currency very inconvenient/impractical/expensive, people _absolutely_ will switch to an alternative. Even though paying for things in dollars in Venezuela is illegal and awkward, everybody goes through convoluted mechanisms to do so anyway because the official alternative is worse.
OT side note: if anyone from HN team is reading this it would be great if the upvote from the parent poster to a comment would be signified visually in some way (like green usernames for 2 week old accounts).