[runeks]

> Or, for that matter, leaving fiscal matters in the hands of a central bank with a board of governors appointed by democratically elected officials?

Money shouldn't be democratic. I'm not OK with a majority deciding that they're entitled to my money.

More generally, private property is a good thing. I don't want majority vote to decide whether I can keep the house or car that I own.

[lisper]

How would you pay for infrastructure?

[runeks]

I see nothing wrong with taxes. I just don’t think a monetary unit managed by politicians works in the long run.

[lisper]

But the power to set monetary policy is just a restricted version of the power to tax. Creating money is effectively a tax on savings. So why are you OK with taxes in general, but not this very restricted tax?

[runeks]

> Creating money is effectively a tax on savings.

No, it’s much more than that. For example, by creating money, and using it to buy bonds, you can push down the rate of interest. This has nothing to do with taxes. It’s an interference with market coordination, because interest rates play a central part in this.

For example, let’s say you have a business worth one billion dollars, and you earn 50 million dollars in profit per year (a 5% yield per annum). By setting the Federal Funds rate at 6%, the government can make it profitable to sell this business and deposit the proceeds in a bank account, hereby earning one percentage point more in yearly returns.

The government shouldn’t have the power to halt economic activity in this manner, because it amounts to central planning, ie. communism. Which has been proven to be a disaster.

[lisper]

> by creating money, and using it to buy bonds, you can push down the rate of interest. This has nothing to do with taxes

Of course it does. It's all just wealth redistribution. Lowering interest rates redistributes wealth from lenders to borrowers, i.e. from savers to debtors.

> By setting the Federal Funds rate at 6%, the government can make it profitable to sell this business

The government can do exactly the same thing with tax policy. The only difference is that tax policy is more flexible (because it has many degrees of freedom rather than just one) and hence more powerful. The power to control the money supply is a proper subset of the power to tax. You can't support the latter but not the former and remain logically consistent.