I’ve been slumming it with the lads on interest.co.nz yesterday, where Bernard Hood and his merry men have been waxing
lyrical about helicopter money; the supposed need, that is, for governments to
monetise their debt by the magic smoke and mirrors of central banks printing
money.
To that thread I simply commented as follows:
Why don't we fill the ATM's with an infinite supply of money and all citizens can go and pull out as much as they want? Need a house, just pull out the money and go buy it. No need to work.
... Because this doesn't solve the issues and problems the market mechanism is so essential for, does it. Production, including what to produce, and scarcity. Why would anyone bother building the house, if they can supply all their needs via the ATM, and then even if the house were to appear - perhaps someone built it for a hobby - say it's the only house, then what use pulling out $1.1 million from the ATM if the guy behind me can do the same, plus $1. Or a trillion dollars for that matter, as money is just confetti. The whole pricing mechanism is now broken, there is no allocation system to determine the use (and who uses) resources ... it's got to end badly, surely, as I suspect the one who gets the house will ultimately be the one who can weld the most force to secure, then defend it. Money, that has value, is at the centre of civilised, peaceful society.
Well how do consequences change between a private sector doing this, and the public sector?
To date, to wit, not one of the merry men has
answered; simply resnotting to my comment with various infantile impugnings of
my character as a libertarian and all the usual ad hominem.
Regarding my post, mulling over the notion of it
all ending badly, the only way the US, for example, can service its growing debt
is to print money; I can’t even remember which quantitative easing they’re on
(four, I think, or it could be six?). I suspect the price for helicopter money
is when debt gets to a certain height, the economy will be lost in the rotors,
and that will not be pretty: it could, indeed, be bloody. The graph of US debt
below indicates surely a day of reckoning shortly, because that cliff they’ve
been creating for too long now, it's getting high, steeply.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI wrote a reply to your post Mark, possibly your main question was rhetorical however?
ReplyDeletehttp://wwaet.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/free-from-ideology-or-free-form-ideology.html
Interesting to see you have a blog nic. Two quick points for now (I'm on an iPad which I hate tapping away on):
DeleteYou've answered me out of context, which was I was replying to Bernard Hickey's suggestion that government should monetise debt and embark on quantitative easing to the extent the US has in order the government can spend in an untrammelled fashion. ( What do you think of the US QE program?)
Never ignore context.
If you were to read the rest of my blog you'll see I'm no more in love with fractional reserve banking and the fiat money system than you are, indeed, I don't consider the West as capitalist at all; our central banked, taxed, highly regulated economies are closer to command economies than lassiez faire ones. I'm not too sure what to move to if central banks, et al were abolished, between a return not necessarily to a gold standard, but a currency backed by some such (possibly a basket of commodities), or I've been reading on free banking, but am not confident enough to write on that at length at this stage.
As to your arguments on redistribution, inequality, etc, my blog, again, in it's entirety, is the riposte to those. Thanks for reading my blog; more should ;)
:) Further random comments I've made to nic's thread - regarding (2) at some stage I shall be blogging about Bitcoin:
Delete1.
PS as I've said on my blog, somewhere, our current crony capitalist economies are to capitalism, what sea horses are to horses.
2.
Actually - you did invite me to your blog - sort of related, an economy based on the digital Bitcoin currency would excite me. Bitcoin has it's own site, easy to find by Googling, though here is - noting I'm libertarian/Austrian, not anarchist- Jeffrey Tucker on it:
http://lfb.org/blog/my-new-bitcoin-life/
3. The biggy for me:
Um, finally, getting back to your post, which I've almost read now, because I have fundamental disagreement with our banking system, I run my life, and my family, with no debt; I no more want to be a debt slave to this banking system, than a tax slave. And there's my beef; I can voluntarily choose not to be a debt slave, however, in being a tax slave I have nil choice because Big Brother State always has a gun at my head. My support of laissez faire is hardly about economics, it's about the voluntary society based on the voluntary transaction. All explained in my blog, so readers should follow your link, really, they should.