Look, I object to the idea that the host country is responsible for the spread of diseases that are brought by immigrants, which is what you're implying when you blame the spread of diseases on the lack of affordable healthcare. I didn't know this was controversial.
No immigrant who turns up at the US border has paid any taxes or contributed anything to US society. It's ridiculous to suggest otherwise. Anyway, that wasn't the point. The point is that if you enter a foreign country it's your responsibility not to bring any diseases with you.
How does an asset prove itself to be a capable store of value? I say the first condition is that it must have a stable (non-speculative) demand, which bitcoin notoriously lacks, and can never have because it doesn't do anything. It doesn't exist physically, therefore it can't be consumed or used as raw material. And as a financial asset it's nobody's liability, so like an IOU that promises to pay nothing. In conclusion, bitcoin's market value is driven 100% by a speculative demand and that's not a basis for a reliable store of value.
> You can easily approximate the net wealth of any company owner in the EU
I don't see how. Unless you're talking about a people who owns a significant percentage of a publicly-traded company, but that's most certainly not "any company owner". Probably less than 1% of the population.
The author certainly makes this claim, but fails to provide any evidence.
"It is during this period [the era between the mid-1830s and the
Civil War] that the word inflation begins to emerge in the literature, not in reference to something that happens to prices, but as something that happens to a paper currency.7"
Speculation is always based on future price expectations. Whether such expectations are justified is a matter of debate of course. Personally I don't find any of the rationales convincing, quite the opposite. But, look, we already have examples of irrational behaviour such as in the case of lotteries. In principle, no rational person should buy a lottery ticket, since the expected value of a lottery ticket is negative. Yet many people buy lottery tickets. The world is full of gullible people who are willing to believe that they can get rich for free.
You're just parroting the same thing again and again without providing any evidence. For a start, the amount of money in circulation is an unobservable quantity. It's extremely unlikely that the Romans had a word for it.
You're quite right that neither fiat money nor bitcoin have intrinsic value, though they both have exchange value (i.e. market value). This means there must be a demand that prevents the market value from falling to zero. In the case of fiat currency, the public demands fiat currency for transaction purposes and to pay taxes. In the case of bitcoin, the demand for transaction purposes is anecdotal, almost nonexistent. So the demand for bitcoin is almost entirely speculative. (There's no other possibility as far as I know, given no intrinsic value.) In other words, people demand bitcoin because they expect that the price of bitcoin will go up. Such a demand can be sustained as long as people continue to have the same expectations. When (or if) these expectations change, the demand can evaporate quite quickly, and the price will collapse dramatically as a result. So bitcoin is not backed by math. It's backed by a speculative demand.
Classical economists didn't seem to use the term 'inflation' in either sense. I can't find any evidence that 'modern economists' have corrupted the original meaning, like you imply.
This isn't entirely accurate, either. An increase in the cost of living occurs when real wages fall (in other words, when workers paid less, in real terms (adjusted for inflation), for the same amount of work). In principle, inflation doesn't necessarily lead to an increase in the cost of living, although in practice usually it does.
So I can use the word 'dog' to mean a cat? Nonsense. The purpose of words is to communicate meaning. Therefore we must agree on what that meaning is beforehand in order to communicate effectively.