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I had a interesting thought the other day. One of the official purposes of inflation is to discourage money-hoarding.
Now, obviously something is a bit nuts about our resource allocation system because humanity is fantastically wealthy and yet people are having trouble affording food and a place to live. This is partially because of greed, but it’s also partially because the idea of money is fatally flawed in a bunch of ways. See other places in this blog for more about that.
Various band-aids have been suggested – obviously inflation is a band-aid which penalizes people for money-hoarding but also results in money becoming steadily more and more out of whack with reality because money is backed by all it can buy and it is backed by steadily more actual value.
I’ve talked about the desirability of having two types of money, one for finite nonrenewable resources and the other for renewable resources, and having UBE for the latter. I’ve talked also about the desirability of tracking every kilowatt-hour, man-hour, gram of copper, gram of silicon, etc, etc that goes into each transaction, so we could finally find out what we can and can’t afford.
I’ve talked about the desirability of having wallets that have a *maximum* quantity they can hold, to discourage money-hoarding (which is a stupid and counterproductive behavior – it hurts the hoarder, it hurts everyone) – with of course a quota board to approve *really* big projects like starships.
I’ve also talked about how we should ban all behaviors which do not match the real world. Charging 30% interest is not reasonable, because in the real world your resources didn’t expand by 30% over a year. Any time we make the paper tracking system do something the real world did not do, trouble is likely to ensue – and indeed, trouble has – our resource allocation system makes it look like humanity is just barely holding on by the skin of it’s teeth when in fact humanity is spectacularly wealthy.