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Comment by canjobear | Hacker News Reader

If I earn a dollar I want its value to be as stable as possible for as long as possible. Why would anyone want to submit to top-down technocratic social engineering projects designed to change their behavior by manipulating the value of their money?

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You're already participating in such a project. Every government currency is inflationary, their value trends towards zero over time. This is by design. Capitalists want you to spend that money as soon as possible instead of amassing vast amounts of it. They punish currency holders with inflation. If you don't spend the money or lend it out so others can spend it, the money loses part of its value. They want people spending and consuming constantly in order for the world to keep turning.

"Change their behavior" is quite the understatement.

All this causes is a massive amount of busywork just to have a shot at maintaining the value of your previous work. This is not necessary for a good economy, not to mention all the externalities it creates.

> Capitalists want you to spend that money as soon as possible instead of amassing vast amounts of it

No, capitalists want your money to be productive. You don't have to spend your money, though that is an option, you have many other options for what to do with your money.

> you have many other options for what to do with your money

That's what I meant by "or lend it out so others can spend it". That's what all those options come down to. Money cannot just sit in someone's accounts doing nothing, it must either be spent or given to someone else who will spend it: loans, investments.

Be productive or allocate capital to people who are relatively more productive than you….

The dollar has been amazingly stable over the last 50 years.

Outside of the last year, we haven’t broken the feds 2% inflation target for the majority of the last decade. Further, we haven’t experienced high inflation for the vast majority of of time that we’ve been off of the gold standard. Yet, the crypto maximalists run around like the US is Zimbabwe.

The dollars you made in the beginning of your career, 50 years ago, would be quite few relatively. Every year you can buy a little less for it. So you need to work twice for your money, once to acquire it and once more to keep its value by investing or w/e scheme you come up with. Stable, possibly. Good for the common man? Disagree.

http://thumbnails-visually.netdna-ssl.com/purchasing-power-o...

he or she just said. with bitcoin, the value of your dollar is going up. that sounds great, but it creates a pressure to not spend and means that the relative value of your debts are also going up

I get that you don't want The Powers That Be to have any control over anything, including your money. but we live in a collaborative economy. if your neighbor doesn't spend it hurts you, and vice versa. monetary policy allows the system to work, whether most people understand it or not

Because when everyone else stops investing, and starts hoarding their dollars due to deflationary pressures, the economy stops, and so does your ability to earn dollars.

I don't like brushing my teeth, but it's preferable to getting meth-mouth.

Because that change in behavior is what lets markets work. With an inflationary currency, people want to create more wealth which is a net benefit to a society. With a deflationary currency, investing in the real world loses money, which disincentivizes projects that make the world better.

The problem with these purely verbal arguments is that they can be made to sound convincing either way.

E.g. Inflation is good because it encourages people to invest in things, creating jobs. However, inflation is bad because it encourages people to take unnecessary financial risks (like borrowing or lending money) when they could instead save it for a rainy day.

Who knows who's right? I have no idea.

Saving the money for a rainy day is what strangles the economy. The economy's health is, to an approximation, the rate at which people spend money.

Slow the rate at which money flows through the economy, and bam, welcome to a recession/depression.

It's not a question of morality, as much as it's a question of mathematics. You may consider saving to be virtuous, and debt to be sinful, and sure, fine, that is your value system, but the only reason any of us have work is because we all spend, as opposed to save.

You can envision a society where people mostly work for themselves, where this wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately, modern society relies on specialization, and I can't make most of the things I need by myself.

To keep the dollar stable you need to increase the supply at the same rate as GDP growth.

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