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by roenxi
1487 days ago
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> The alternative to printing money would be to raise money through taxation, which is also politically infeasible. The scary thing, looking back on the 20th century, is that is probably what was said in a lot of places that then went through extreme political turmoil. There have been a lot of instances where the only politically feasible road was printing money. That is typically the introduction in stories that end in poverty and/or war. No examples are leaping to mind of case studies where extreme money creation led to happiness and tranquillity. Possibly someone should try one of these infeasible options. Someone has to do without when the government goes spending. We can pretend that nobody is paying, but if that becomes policy option #1 - as seems to be happening - then that sort of wilful ignorance on the part of the elites leads to real anger. |
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Well, yes; inequality and shortages that the elite refuse to address lead to a lot of the classic Latin American revolutions, as well as the earlier Chinese revolution and Russian revolution. This is the concept referred to as "redistribution is insurance against pitchforks".
> wilful ignorance on the part of the elites
This really characterises a lot of the post 2016 era. The amount of incredibly stupid and incoherent nonsense. But no matter how comfortable the narrow elite are, no matter how much surplus money is sloshing around for crazy startup projects and asset price inflation, they're not going to tolerate higher taxes.
(I hereby propose the least politically feasible project ever: confiscatory taxes on billionaires, but the money is simply deleted in an effort to bring down the money supply)