[unishark]

Well if the value of money is going down then the price of everything else goes up (land, stocks, precious metals). The incentive is to convert cash into these alternatives.

Seems to me the same is true for borrowers. Borrowing money to buy land/stocks/etc is still a smart move as long as they keep trending upwards faster than the loan rates. Of course this requires sufficiently low interest rates be available, which is where the reference "our system" comes in I suppose, with a federal reserve maintaining artificially-low rates to drive this wealth transfer from savings to borrowers.

This is just the sideshow of wealth moving around, of course. I don't really buy that that if this game ended it means the death of the entire economy. It's just the part that can be subjected to manipulation. Obviously the point of earning money in the first place is to spend it, not just save or transfer it from one medium to another. Money is just an exchange itself. In deflation, things get cheaper and supply-and-demand curves says more people will buy things.