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Comment by jocaal | Hacker News Reader

Funny how people complain about federal debt, when the people complaining benefitted the most from the system. It is your children who will be paying the interest, while the older folk enjoyed a heated economy with high government spending. Economics is just as fundemental as physics. There are conservation laws that cannot be violated. However you can make other people hold the bag.

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> There are conservation laws that cannot be violated.

Modern Monetary Theory on line 2 for you!

There is no possible sense in which "economics is just as fundamental as physics": the latter concerns the behavior of the physical world with or without humans in it; the former describes the dynamics of a human created system featuring humans interacting with each other and the physical world.

Monetary identities can not be violated¹. What you are talking about isn't one of them.

1 - They are also useless by themselves, any rule that actually tells you something will have exceptions.

What are those conservation laws?

It's simple accounting. Net money in must be more than or equal to net money out when adjusting for any temporal changes in the face value of the assets. If you use more than you produce, either you are going to have to pay in the future, or in the case of the government, you can die and let your children pay.

There's no law of conservation of money. It can be pretty trivially created and destroyed. It may not be a good idea, but it's entirely doable.

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