[notahacker]

> But how are you removing a asset from circulation? Like I asserted in my original post when you are not using money, somebody else is -- unless you are actually putting your cash in a vault.

The original article - what we're actually discussing - chooses the example of buying and selling with cash through a window, and worries that actually putting the cash into circulation at all might create inflation. The example is carefully constructed to avoid anything being done with the money except buy and sell goods, and the act of withdrawing the grain from circulation is likewise celebrated as value creation. It's pure internet-Austrianism.

As for the real world, the ability of real world banks operating in a fractional reserve system to lend to boatbuilders is not constrained in any meaningful sense at the margin by speculators' willingness to deposit with them, whereas boatbuilders' willingness to pay staff and suppliers is entirely dependent on whether people who have accumulated wealth buy boats. So the causality works the same way: consumption, deferred or otherwise, is the necessary element for growth. And if people who've made a bunch of money off speculation want to really improve the world, they'll want their money invested somewhere more actively than a bank or spent.