Care to elaborate? It’s thought provoking as a mechanism to reduce all of this zero sum (or even worse, parasitic) effort that dominates our system.
A little inflation means that your currency buys stuff _today_ that's worth more than hoarding it for _tomorrow_, so you spend, vitalizing the economy.
The reality is, it needs to be balanced. There needs to be enough money in circulation such that economic activity is not stymied, but not so much that it starts price wars.
Kinda like blood sugar!
Currency inflation leads to unfair distribution because the value of financial assets grows faster than the real economy (it inflates).
Currency deflation benefits the poorer. As technology and productivity grow, it costs less to produce goods, so their prices should decrease.
The currency hoarding behavior that you describe is no different than today’s financial investment.
It is trivially easy to avoid the effects of inflation by investing - if you have assets to invest, that is. But if you live month to month, you get screwed by inflation, because your salary is sticky as prices rise.
In the 1980's and 1990's computer industry, your dollars could buy a lot more megahertz or megabytes every year.
If the "deflation = bad" people were correct, everyone should have held onto their dollars waiting for next year's tech, knowing it would be a lot better than this year's tech. No one should have wanted to buy computers, and the tech industry should have been in a gigantic depression.
Broad-based deflation due to a lack of money to buy goods and services is bad.
The United States has attempted several times to use a gold standard. However, it results in unacceptable outcomes every time. In the 1970s, President Nixon led the US to leave the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange due to trading partners converting excessive amounts of gold (specie). It has been found time after time that central banks need to adjust the value of their currency to account for financial shocks with countercyclical monetary policy.
How does the rate we pull gold out of the ground relate to the rate of production and value growth?
No working is required, when you can print any amount of currency and can buy anything from any part of the world with it. Yes, printing speed up inflation a bit, but unlike in any other country of the world, when US is printing dollars, they spread the effects of inflation on all of the world: US becomes richer and all other countries a bit poorer.
This is why linking dollar to the gold would kill US prosperity. Also, one reason is why US is so heavily militarized and is fighting wars all over the world: you need to constantly threaten all the world so that they can't even think of choosing any other mean for world trade other than dollar.
Bingo ! Many people conveniently overlook this reality. Most countries don't simply choose to trade and hold USD because it's the most stable currency pegged to a stable, rationally driven economy. No, it's because if they choose not to, they suddenly become a "nuclear threat to world peace" and we magically find non existent WMDs. It's a bullying tactic.