| > It discourages saving, but not investment (and only the latter has intrinsic societal benefit). Not true. To begin with, what most people think of as "savings" is actually an investment—unless your savings take the form of cash stuffed in a mattress. An interest-bearing savings account is an investment, after all, even before we consider that larger sums would normally be held in money-market accounts or CDs. Even if you did keep your savings stuffed in a mattress, though, that saving still benefits others. You produced something of value and you're not spending the cash you received in return on things other people also want to buy. This reduces the supply of cash in circulation relative to the amount of goods available to be purchased and thus lowers prices for everyone else compared to what they would have had to pay if you'd chosen to spend the money. Normally in a healthy, growing economy this forbearance would be rewarded through appreciation of the purchasing power of the unspent cash over time—price deflation—but TPTB have decreed that price deflation is evil and must be avoided at all costs. (The key lesson here is that it's a really bad idea to treat any fiat currency as a store of value, since they can always make more and dilute your savings.) >> 3) It encourages consumption and spending on frivolities. > Spending is generally framed as societal good and the definition of a "frivolity" is highly subjective. I'll grant that "frivolity" is subjective but consumption is pretty much the opposite of a societal good. It's not a bad thing, of course. Production without consumption would be pointless and wasteful. However, it's the process of production that provides value to others; consumption is just the opposite, claiming one's own personal share of what all the members of society have collectively produced. > Are you seriously proposing that only those who inherit riches can improve the world??? It is an objective fact that those few lone individuals who can claim to have lived their lives free of unearned gifts from their parents or other interested parties (apart from life itself, which is a major concession) have not been particularly successful at improving the world beyond the narrow scope of their own necessities. That's because they're spending their entire lives and all of their energies just trying to survive. Just having parents who take even the most basic care of you as you're growing up is a huge inheritance in its own right. More indirectly, we have the vast stores of knowledge left to us by previous generations as well as a huge amount of capital to amplify the productivity of our efforts. We tend to focus on mere differences in inherited material possessions, but in reality that pales in comparison to the vast riches gifted to even the poorest among us has by those who came before. |