On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 09:56:10AM -0700, Nicholas Leippe wrote: > On Friday 05 December 2008 09:18:21 am Von Grant Fugal wrote: > > How do you propose to distribute this new money in lockstep with capita > > changes? > > Perhaps you could give each newborn an average savings worth of > > money in a trust fund. Anything less than this is redistribution of > > wealth and is abhorrently immoral. > > Let's not get into the subject of individual's differring morals. > > You are suggesting here that there is no other way to increase the supply in > a > fair manner. It's simple really. The purchase of goods and services by the > government would be done with newly minted/printed currency as opposed to > currency already in the budget. As opposed to being done by fractional > reserve > banking as it is done today. To decrease the money supply, currency collected > from the sale of public goods and services can simply be withheld from > circulation, and taken off the books.
I've been reading much of this discussion of money and banking with amusement as well as interest. To understand money, hold in mind that there is absolutely nothing magical about it. It is a commodity like any other. Carry the implications of that realization out and many of the questions you guys are discussing are instantly answered. The only thing that is tricky stems from money's nature as a medium of exchange: There are time when you have to invert your logic. For example, if the supply of commodity X, say, plywood, increases, you can reasonably expect the price of X to decrease. Since prices are stated in terms of money, you have to invert your thinking: what happens if the supply of money increases is that the price of everything else increases. For further reading, let me suggest starting with Murray N. Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? I suspect it's available on the net somewhere; try mises.org. One implication is that, like any other commodity, you are better off not having the government supply the stuff. In fact you are better off with government not defining the term (legal tender laws). So to deal with the supply of gold or silver or whatever: same as any other commodity: if there isn't enough of it, someone likely will go mine some. Or sell off old, worn jewelry. At least miners are limited by physical constraints in how much of the stuff they can produce; central banks have no such constraints with fiat currency. And if the market decides there still isn't enough of the stuff? Substitution: the market can start using something else as a medium of exchange. Time on mobile phones, for example. An absurd example? Maybe, but mobile phone air time is a de facto currency in parts of Africa. > > Well, it's theft if done by private individuals for private gain. If > the government (we'll pretend a government that's by and for the > people, assuming one exists), then no private individual gains > anything by doing so--it is a benefit to _all_ of the people by > maintaining a stable per-capita money supply. Because the government > is in essence the collective of the people-- thus the people are the > ones printing the new money. Here we have profound disagreement: if it's theft when a private individual does it, it's theft when a government does it. Governments are composed of people, and morality doesn't magically change just because one is anointed king or elected senator or whatever. If you or I have no moral right to do a thing, then we cannot delegate the power to do that thing to someone else. -- Charles Curley /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign Looking for fine software \ / Respect for open standards and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email http://www.charlescurley.com / \ No M$ Word docs in email Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0 809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB
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