Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

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>As much as people don't want to hear it money is meant to be spent, only the perverse hedonic treadmill effect brought us in this scenario where it's used to keep the score

Well, in theory it just means that owning money is a leisure activity for these people. People like spending money on leisure. According to Austrian economists interest rates simply represent people's time preferences. For some strange reason they believe that interest must be positive because time preference is always positive (people want things now instead of later).

They clearly ignored that people might want money/capital (not things) now and things later. If that were the case, then their time preference would be negative and it would also mean interest rates must be negative. So even by the weird Austrian economics logic interest rates must become negative as more billionaires accumulate capital for the sake of accumulating it, rather than for the sake of production.

It's not only billionaires, it's everybody.

> Must become negative

If everybody likes to accumulate money instead of spending and thus have the preference you mentioned then there is no way interest rates would become negative (and I mean really negative not the couple of tenth of a percent).

Money is a human abstraction, and thus it's inherently political, the most unpopular thing out there is inflation and negative interest rates. You have 100% people against it. Inflation is possibly more unpoular than a recession because it raises alarm bells in the populace even in absence of a recession.

At least with taxation it's something like 80-20 and the only thing which is a matter of discussion is how much taxation needs to be imposed and how to spend tax money (Republicans want to direct them towards the military and defense, whereas democrats want to direct them towards social spending and welafare)

It's a cultural thing, but even old people with few years left are all about accumulation, you'd need some sort of common shock such as young people and adults in their 40s collectively have a close call that would force them to evaluate their mortality and prompt them to structure their finances to "die with zero or negative net worth)

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