A Cultural Thought Experiment

Getting back to the case in question, the link between printing money and inflation isn't magical, the mechanism that turns more money into inflation is people using that money to bid up the prices of goods and services. But the money that was in the mattress wasn't being spent on anything. So both taxing that money away and printing new money result in exactly the same amount of new money chasing goods and services.

You don't have to take my word for it. During '09 the supply of dollars increased by a pretty sizable amount, but we actually managed to have negative inflation because the Fed's interest on reserves policies managed to keep all that new money in the vaults of large banks rather than in circulation.

Let us not forget that the social security system, with unemployment insurance and a state pension, was invented in the late 19th century by that well-known radical leftist, Prince Otto von Bismarck.

(He did it specifically to undermine the socialists, who he viewed as an internal security threat: it was the usual game of giving 90% of the supporters enough to buy them off and then rounding up the 10% radical fringe.)

The greatest hazard for our collective future is that the wealthiest section of our societies seem to have forgotten that there's an implicit social contract in consumer capitalism: mainly because many of them are engaged in financial manipulation with the goal of concentrating wealth, rather than actual primary production with the goal of creating wealth (like Henry Ford -- or, for that matter, Steve Jobs).

Once a capitalist society switches from producing and distributing wealth (so that everyone has an incentive to pitch in and work for it) to allowing the strong to grab as much as they can, the outlook for any kind of cooperation to produce long-term growth becomes bleak.

I am from a former communist country. If you ask my opinion, communism was the most repulsive and despicable experiment in the history of mankind. Nazism was communism under a different name. The way people bonded with each other was through vile and resentful hate of the westernized upper class (communism) or the Jews and the British (nazism). Schoolteachers brainwashed children from the early age to become haters as well. Both were populist movements enabled by "liminal" conditions of post-WWI period and spearheaded by ruthless Machiavellian manipulators of public opinion who harnessed the newly emergent mass-media to appeal to the disgruntled poorly educated populace lacking a better leader. See any Dostoyevsky's novel where he portrays the character known as the "Underground Man" for a better background, as well as the following links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality#Imitation.2C_leaders..., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458375/.

You introduce a dichotomy between wealth (aka Bill Gates) and fame (aka Michelangelo, Einstein). It's a false dichotomy. As PG wrote, money is not wealth. The way money works is that it makes you important in the eyes of a number of people. The way fame works is it makes you important in the eyes of a number of people as well, perhaps a different kind of people, but the underlying logic is the same. It's not one against the other, and whoever ardently defends that idea carries an agenda. Ultimately both money and fame are tokens for power. If you were infinitely powerful, you would need neither.