just declare the leaf to be the official currency ... from one of the books in "The hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy" ... which is, you should know, the only trilogy in five books.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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I do sometimes wonder if you could technically still run a working government off printing money, just recognizing that doing so didnt create more value, but instead acted as a form of taxation. Imagine a government that currently holds no significant fraction of its currency. It then prints an amount equal to what is currently in circulation, doubling the money supply and in doing so presumably halving the value of a given unit of that currency. Once it has done so, no new value is created, but that government has gone from having no significant fraction of the money in circulation, to having half of it, which it can now spend.
Suppose you did this predictably, you let everyone know that you will be increasing the money supply by x percent every year, and will be re-denominating it to avoid difficult to work with numbers at set intervals. Wouldnt you technically have a functioning system for extracting value from the economy to pay for government functions?
It might not be a very good system, since all it would effectively tax is people's savings of currency and not stuff like property, and you would have to set up things like employment contracts or debts to compensate for constant high inflation rates, but Im not sure I see a reason why it technically couldn't be done.
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I mean. Yeah honestly, lol
You laugh, but this actually kinda worked for 1980s Brazil.
Interesting story but it's also talking about how inflation was at 80% in Brazil in the 1980s, because they were printing money. What they did in 1993 with the URVs is a fascinating psychological experiment, but I'm not sure if it was the critical factor in stopping inflation. As per the article
It wasn't the only trick, obviously. While they put URVs in place, the group of economists made the government balance its budget and slow down on money creation.
So I feel like it was basic economic policy that mostly worked, rather than printing money and trying to dictate its value.
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I started turning my American Dollars into Euros. Here's hoping that mitigates the economic damage that will come from Elon's stupidity.
Honestly, I don't like messing around with money since I don't really understand it...but if I don't, I fear that I won't be able to get onto a lifeboat. It also makes me feel silly being proactive. Here's hoping my Blue State would either vindicate or placate my fears.
We can, and we do, for virtually everything.
That’s precisely why the DOGE takeover of the payment system is so scary. Government money isn’t being transferred from some limited pool of taxpayer funds, it’s spent into existence out of thin air.
We also borrow, in the form of bonds, but that’s mostly to tame inflation by taking currency temporarily out of circulation with the promise of a later profit for the bond holder. (And also to encourage long-term investment in domestic currency.)
I think I lost all my braincells
Well, who ever created money can just uncreate it and we end capitalism, eat the rich and have a better planet
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"No matter how times"
🤦♂️