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34 points
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Fun fact for those on the fence about this, the US has monetary sovereignty in a fiat currency, which means that the US government has essentially infinite money.

Edit: for those that are curious, yes, the game about the federal budget is exactly that. The deficit is essentially tracking the amount of money that the federal government owes to itself. Remember, fiat currency means that the value of money exists because the government says that it holds that specific value. A $2 dollar bill is still worth $2 when purchasing items, but worth several $ more than the printed value.

Edit 2: I didn’t think it needed to be said, but I’ve been proven wrong. I don’t literally mean infinite money.

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24 points

I wonder, sometimes, what a society would look like without inflation. Is there an economic system that says “this is the price of bread, from now on” and builds off of that?

Of course, my only talents are music and memes, so I doubt that I’d specifically benefit from such a system, but maybe humanity as a whole?

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18 points

One of the reasons some inflation is ‘good’ is that it drives investment. People are discouraged from saving their money since it will slowly devalue. Rather, those with capital are incentived to invest it in other areas of the economy.

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11 points

That would only happen if deflation was a thing too. In my (highly idealistic) world, money would not change value at all, so growth in a business would be real, not just projected numbers on a chart no one understands. In a fixed-econony, you invest into businesses that actually grow.

I know this may come off as controversial, but this sort of thinking will be necessary for interstellar trade, if we don’t blow ourselves up first.

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12 points

Then bread becomes the currency

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4 points

But fine, then my bicycle is worth how many breads? If I offer to how many breads is that worth? I don’t care what kind of leftist you are, these are the real questions we should be asking in a post-capitalist society.

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1 point

Tiktokers in 2020 just became very wealthy lol

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11 points

I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but I love the revolutionary optimism. That has been a question that has been posed in philosophical politics ever since Marx and Engels were alive.

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15 points

Before even then

Price controls were something people were trying even as far back as the crisis of the third century when Diocletian set the standard prices for several common items bought by the Roman peasantry like bread.

Contrasting against the grain dole, which worked better because it was the state stepping in to directly remove a large cost from the lives of eligible households, allowing them to put that money towards improving their fiscal standing. For ancient Romans it was Bread, but for modern Americans a solid equivalent would be medicine or education, shit you could argue that the post war boom was in part because of the govt. doing this partially with housing, subsidizing the costs of WWII vets to build new homes or buy existing ones, of course because America black vets got shafted and redlined but the general idea is still there.

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4 points

Not sarcastic at all, I just wonder about the need for “growth”. I know absolutely nothing about the theory, I just wanna know why it seems to be necessary. Why don’t we fix prices, or at least have them justified regionally, based on the need of the region?

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9 points

On many items produced in the USSR, the price was molded into the form itself, since it was fixed and wasn’t going to change.

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3 points

That’s how you end up with either huge government spending to keep the prices of something fixed either by subsidies or by buying surpluses.

Or you end up with shortages and a black market.

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2 points

Again, infinite money. Surplus could be exported to countries who don’t have infinite money.

Also, yarr

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12 points

Holy Zimbabwe Batman!

For those that are curious this is not even remotely close to how the economy words. The us government absolutely does not have unlimited real money, sure they can print money and it will become worthless. But that’s not the same.

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0 points

I have sources to back up this claim. Where are yours?

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10 points
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I got a degree in economics. I’m not going to watch up trash on YouTube. If you can’t condense it and make a point it is obviously meaningless.

The government buys things with US dollars, if it uses huge huge amounts of US dollars to buy things you get inflation. It’s a basic premise…

Just look at Germany pre ww2 or look at Zimbabwe after it stopped being Rhodesia.

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6 points

Can we please not have YouTube videos be sources

At best, they’re a tertiary source consistimg of a bunch of condensed summaries of other sources

More often they’re cherrypicked by content creators to build a narrative for entertainment

And like, in this context (Lemmy comment debate) you’re asking people to watch a bunch of videos with ads and debunk the points inside. Maybe thats not too much to ask in other contexts, but you must know nobody arguing with you here is going to spend their time doing that

I could link to a bunch of flat earth videos as sources, and although they would be easily debunked, nobody here is gonna sit through them and follow up the specific claims they make

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1 point

Absolutely correct. And for more detail on how non-fiat economies work and why the deficit is essentially a fiction to keep bond markets functioning, I recommend reading “The Deficit Myth” by Stephanie Kelton. This also explains why the EU will never rival the US (TLDR: EU member states are not able to control their individual monetary policies).

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