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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Your theory is that a free lunch hypothetically exists. It does not, and the belief it does leds to the endemic inflation we have since 1914.

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Where's Japan's inflation? They actually spent more % GDP than the US did on COVID relief.

Note, currently a lot of other countries besides the US are having inflation because of international supply issues. They didn't print money - that suggests we'd also be seeing it if we hadn't printed some.

Actually, we definitely would be seeing economic issues if we hadn't rescued everyone, because we'd all be incapacitated due to COVID. That's called successful investment.

> because we'd all be incapacitated from COVID

Source?

Should be “due to” including economic effects. Ask someone in NYC how they liked living through it.

The bad economic effects were mostly caused by drastic, irrational government overreactions to the disease.

No, they were caused by people not wanting to go to restaurants or travel when they were constantly hearing ambulance sirens outside their window. Also, if your grandparents are dead or you don't want your children exposed you're still incapacitated (via depression, providing childcare, etc) even if personally safe.

Hong Kong is currently providing an example of what happens when you keep society running (via incoming travel bans) so well that nobody bothers getting vaccinated for when it does break through. But since that's omicron, which is a bit milder, they're still doing better than we would've done.

We would have done better if we had followed the science and protected the most vulnerable people as per the Great Barrington Declaration.

https://gbdeclaration.org/

CDC data shows that exposure was never a serious risk for children. COVID-19 is less dangerous to children than RSV, and we never shut down society because of RSV.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/2021/han00443.asp

I don't think Japan is the example you think it is. They've had stagnant GDP growth for the last 20 years (< 2%). In the 1980s they were the fastest growing countries and were the "China" of their time. Spending causes market distortions.

https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp-growth

I do think it is the example I think it is. Their deflationary pressure is so strong they’ve been “printing money” for years before this, are doing even more now, and price inflation has barely happened.

What matters is if the money is spent past supply limits, not if it’s printed.

Although, if you go there the quality of life is high enough that it always seemed like they’re just sandbagging the numbers to keep everyone else away. It’s not all leftover 80s investment.

So you don’t believe that worker productivity can increase? History disagrees. Do you invest your money or do you view that as somehow getting free lunch?

You usually pay up in order to receive increased productivity. It's not the result of some human evolutionary advancement. It's capex spending and modern managerial techniques, both of which cost money.

Free lunch is an extremely vague term. What is your exact hypothesis?

It means you pay for it one way or another.

But the argument wasn't that increasing the money supply doesn't have any negative repercussions. The argument was that increasing the money supply doesn't always result in inflation. Inflation is the "one way" and sometimes we pay with the "another".

> The argument was that increasing the money supply doesn't always result in inflation

I didn't say it did. Don't omit any of the words I wrote.

> The government cannot deficit spend for free. The cost is inflation

Although perhaps you mean by the second portion ", and guess who pays - you and me." that it's not always inflation and can show up in other ways [I don't mean this in a snarky fashion, this is perhaps what you meant?]?

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