Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by roguecoder 5139 days ago
You are missing the piece that all conservative economists miss: access to the medium of exchange. It doesn't matter how well you identify the customer, satisfy their desires and add net value for all parties involved: if that customer doesn't have a job that gives them cash to buy your product the economy grinds to a halt.

It can be summed up by the famous if possibly apocryphal line by Ford: "I pay my employees enough to afford to buy my cars."

1 comments

You are missing the piece that most amateur liberal economists miss: money is only a valid medium of exchange as long as it represents real value. When you forcibly redistribute too much of it, you aren't helping people buy things and "stimulate the economy" except maybe over the very short term. You're just destroying that value that it would otherwise represent.
While that is true, you would have to forcibly redistribute quite a lot of money to destroy more value than you help create.

When the masses have no currency, in effect, that's signaling to the economy that their needs are of no value. Therefore, businesses that solve the masses' problems gain no economic value from it, and will not generate real value.

So currency has no intrinsic value, but it does signal to the economy which needs are more valuable. And currently, one of the claims is that the middle class and poor's needs are valued so low, that it is creating economic stagnation, and there's little incentive to solve their problems.