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Comment by forty | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure I do want people and banks to be able to get back millions they have given away because of a bug :)

Citibank wants that too: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-...

yes that is a valid point but there are others who dont want that because then the central authority can take away your money or stop payments send to you just because they dont like you like what happened to Wikileaks.

Yes, it's true that in case you are in the legendary fascist state that steals your money but allows you the hide your money in crypto currency it can be useful ;) it reminds me of https://xkcd.com/538/ (note that I do not count government taxes in democratic countries as stealing, while I do think tax avoidance is stealing in that case).

And what would you call the US dollar's monetary expansion of over 40% [1] since the start of the pandemic, if not stealing?

The Cantillon Effect has never been stronger, but those that continue to measure their financial worth in a unit of account that is shrinking in its purchasing power every day are missing the point. The system _is_ stealing your savings!

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

Let’s not act like the infusions were for no reason. Many people are willing to incur some inflation and inflation risk in a gamble to avert a near-certain societal level catastrophe.

and which people were those? rich people, that's who...

I agree that desperate times call for desperate measures, but there are fairer ways to fund this. Just inflating the money supply just hits asset-poor people hardest... this is the very definition of the Cantillon Effect...

Which of these fairer mechanisms were actually practically available to us on the time frame and scale that we needed them?

taxing big tech properly?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com