Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

>1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people.

Inflation isn't meant to cause rising prices. It's a shitty approximation for negative interest rates. What inflation is doing is letting money rust so that it is flexible enough to represent the real world. Logically speaking income earned in 2010 should be losing value because of the opportunity cost of not employing people. Imagine an economy with two people and you decide to spend your money ten years later. The other party has to spend 10 years unemployed. Even though you lost 10 years of potential employment you still insist that your money from 10 years ago is still worth the same amount. Inflation adds enough flexibility to represent this loss and makes the holder of money realize the loss in the real economy, which encourages him to minimize the loss in the real world. With deflation you deny its existence by making the money system rigid and incapable of representing this potential state of the economy.

Say's law postulates that aggregate demand and supply are always in balance in a barter economy. Money as an intermediary allows short term mismatch between the two and deflation allows an almost permanent mismatch. Since inflation erodes past income any surplus is eroded which encourages people to utilize their surplus and let aggregate supply and demand match again.

>2) Advocate that governments can spend potentially an infinite amount without consequences because they control a printing press. And looking at the actions of, e.g. the US government, it is easy to suspect that the people who understand the nuance there aren't the ones in control of the money supply.

Maybe you like to think that other people think like that but reality is quite boring. What people have recognized is that the real world matters, not the financial world. If you see an unemployed person you can hire that person and at the end of the day customers are happy because that person provided goods and services and the worker is happy because he got paid. If granting credit and promising debt lets that person work, then it's better than trusting on some financial bean counter that tells you that employing people and providing goods and services is bad for the economy.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: