[nandemo]

I didn't say that issuing bonds is getting free money. The point is when the Central Bank prints money and then spends it on X, the institution selling X is indirectly getting free money or, equivalently, everyone else holding dollars becomes a bit poorer.

[spinchange]

When a Central Bank engages in something like quantitative easing, no one is getting "free money." Other governments or banking institutions are borrowing and re-lending it to others who do the same until it finally gets to real people who exchange their physical time, labor, and output for it.

That is how capital is diffused in the current system. Yes, it is absolutely inflationary, imperfect, and this is big oversimplification, but the bottom line is that money has no inherent value. The issuing bodies -or more closely- the groups of people they represent, do. I hold that true for Bitcoin too - a hash string has no inherent value, nor does the "proof of work" that was required to generate it - it's all about artificial scarcity seeded randomly to an entirely non-random segment of the population.