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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>... asset price inflation. [...] Is this sustainable?

No but society has basically locked us all into it. I made a previous comment on why devaluing the currency causes a worldwide game theory of economic actors protecting their purchasing power to counteract it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15728480

Can we reconfigure society? It doesn't seem like it. Some critics today think that Bitcoin's limit of 21 million to support its philosophy against inflation is wrong.

Hey, maybe it isn't society that wants inflation but it's the US Govt and/or The Fed Reserve forcing it on us. Well, surveys say the majority of Americans want $2000 stimulus checks so that money has to come from somewhere. It's easier for politicians to print new money rather than sell Yellowstone Park to China for a few trillion dollars.

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Maybe the Fed and/or congress want a big money printing and/or tax hike, but to make it happen, they have to take a huge proportion of the profits away from the rich and give it to everybody else in the US and Europe. But to give it to everyone else they only have to get the money out of the banking system and into the banks. Then, they can decide if they want a bailout or no. We already have a banking system running at 100% capacity...

I'm not saying I'm against government regulation. I certainly am not. At all. I'd like to see some way to control inflation and the monetary system for good. But I'm against it getting too out of control in the first place. That's in my own interests. Maybe I'm wrong on that. I don't mind inflation. When it's controlled I want it to decrease, because, as I've said in other posts, more economic growth creates less government interference and I think that's what we want for Bitcoin. But I don't want anything that gets too out of control to stop the currency from appreciating. When it's artificially forced onto the market I'd like to see it to decline and be replaced with something, maybe a currency with a higher cap or something.

It's all up to us, the Bitcoin community. You choose to participate in the process or you don't.

The problem is that the fed has no direct access to the economy. Imagine being an admin and having access to the bank accounts of everyone. You could hand out money exactly where it is needed and drive 2% inflation without unintended externalities. For obvious reasons, this is never going to happen and it probably should never happen.

> $2000 stimulus checks so that money has to come from somewhere. It's easier for politicians to print new money

printing money out of thin air, vs borrowing money (via gov't bonds) are different things. I believe the US borrowed this money for the stimulus cheques.

Borrowed from whom? If it is another federal organization, then I do not see a difference. If my left pocket borrows money from the right one to give money to someone, yet my right pocket was empty to begin with, any money were created out of thin air during such a borrowing process.

> Borrowed from whom?

Borrowed from taxpayers. The instrument is an AOT tax deduction/rebate for the 2021 tax year. "We know you are going to pay your taxes, you can have some of it back right now".

Yeah a stimulus check is just a tax rebate for private individuals instead of doing a tax rebate for corporations.

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