Why Its Pointless To Argue With Global Warming Believers 2093

That's a factor, yes. And it would be exactly the same with gold-backed currency.

Unless you started working less, or at a comparatively lower paying job, odds are you had more buying power. This handy chart of inflation-adjusted GDP per capita illustrates why:

Of course, some things have gotten more expensive, and others have gotten cheaper, so depending on your specific buying habits, you may or may not be able to get more of the specific items *you* want.

Obviously if you're on a fixed income, which doesn't take inflation into account, you could be in some trouble.

But, of course, gold wouldn't actually solve this problem. Say you have a pension that pays you a fixed amount every month. When the company decided how big that pension would be, odds are they took the fact that money would be worth less by the time you were collecting it into account. If they'd known that money would be worth *more* (as it would be in a deflationary gold system), they probably wouldn't have agreed to give you as much of it.

I'm not sure why the word 'yet' is in there. This is the typical pattern. High interest rates lead to less borrowing, which leads to less business expansion, which leads to less growth.

No. Well, yes, but what matters is the amount of money relative to the size of the economy. If the money supply remains the same while the economy grows, that will also offset inflation.

Basically, but this doesn't mean what you seem to think it does.

Think of money a sort of IOU token from the economy to a specific individual or organization. This makes a lot of sense. I go off and do work. Now, I've contributed something to the economy, but I haven't gotten anything in return yet. To keep track of this difference, I get these IOU tokens, in the form of money. I can trade these in at a later time. When I've spent them all, the economy has given me goods and services equal in value to the contribution my work made (well, as determined by the market, but that's a whole different argument), and I don't have any IOU tokens left.

In other words, money, just by the way it's used, represents debt. Note that this doesn't change significantly if the tokens one uses are backed by (or even made of) gold, unless the individual considers the *gold itself* (not the goods or service it could be exchanged for) sufficient payment, which one wouldn't expect to generally be the case.

Now, of course, we get into the issue of how these IOU tokens get created in the first place. Obviously "the economy" isn't a coherent enbreasty which can issue anything to anyone. And the government can't just print them up and deal them out, because transactions take place between two or more individual parties -- if you worked for your employer, but the government created the money you got paid out of thin air, your employer would be getting your labor for free, which wouldn't make any sense.

Well, it turns out there's a pretty simple way to create new IOU tokens without anyone involved getting something for nothing. You deal out IOU tokens to people who haven't done anything to earn them -- but they have to give them back later, and give you a few extra to pay for the service, and to cover the costs of the risk you might not make full repayment.

In other words, you put new IOU tokens into circulation by creating them and then *loaning* them out.

The reason this *isn't* a huge ponzi scheme is because one of the major reasons why people need larger numbers of IOU tokens than they could reasonably earn is to use them to start up productive enterprises. As a result, there's a fairly strong correlation between the number of IOU tokens that end up in circulation, and the real productivity of the economy. So, you don't end up with a situation where more and more tokens have to chase after the same amount of goods. Sometimes the token supply does grow a little bit faster than the supply of goods and services, of course, because no system is perfect. This is where you get inflation.

However, because there's a demand for these IOU tokens, on the part of people who plan to use them to run productive enterprises, this isn't really a problem. You can take the tokens you've got now and give them to such people, and you'll get more back later, either because they're paying you for the temporary use of your tokens (when you buy bonds, or when you put money in a savings account and the bank pays you a part of the money they derive from lending it out to others), or because you've purchased a portion of a company that increases in value (when you buy stocks). If you give your tokens to the right people, the real value of the amount you get back will be larger than the amount you handed over, and this will more than offset inflation.

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I've already replied to it in several other posts where you linked to it.

-- "Those who enter the country illegally violate the law." -- George W. Bush in Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005