Some goods have gotten cheaper as they've had more capital invested in their production processes, but many goods do not. Automobiles are a classic example. Ask your grand parents how much they paid for their first car. Yes, the goods are different, and cars today are better, but it's not clear that we shouldn't still compare the socially equivalent car of today with the one of 50 years ago.
A steady, low inflation rate is necessary for a healthy economy. Otherwise you'd get a Bitcoin situation where everyone is busy HODLing and never spending.
Saving is healthy for economy. Inflation is slavery. Inflation moves capital from the productive to the unproductive, from the efficient to the inefficient.
Almost the reverse is true. Inflation increases the opportunity cost of choosing not to use one's claim on future resources productively, and incentivises investment in production.
Saving is healthy for the economy when the savings are invested in production. It is not healthy for the economy when savings are hoarded for risk-free gains at the expense of investment-starved productive entities.
False. People are already storing their wealth in gold, art, collector items, land and real estate without looking for any profits. They're just defending from monetary inflation. These assets resemble hard money in their properties, because they're scarce and can't be created from thin air. You can't stop people from parking their wealth in non-productive hard assets.
The problem is that money is created from thin air and it's used to buy these hard assets. It's not used for productive investments.
Inflation is stealing and it's not healthy for economy.
Inflation is no more stealing than the dynamics of supply and demand are, which is to say, only as much as society permits and ostensibly finds desirable.
True, if we're in a hard money standard, and there's natural inflation. In a hard money standard inflation and deflation would be caused by supply and demand fluctuations of real economy.
Monetary inflation, i.e forced inflation by creating money from thin air, is stealing. In hard money standard, there would be a natural price discovery for interest rates, based on supply and demand of money. It's obvious that if someone can basically counterfeit money, it is stealing.
In Bitcoin standard, there would be no hidden information in money itself. Now, central bank policies have become the information that moves markets. I.e. we are not in a free market economy.
> forced inflation by creating money from thin air, is stealing
That's just your ethical interpretation. Society in aggregate defines what is and isn't stealing, and at the moment we've deemed monetary inflation to be ethically acceptable, and even desirable.
In a way, the use of monetary inflation to transfer wealth could be seen as the realization of a sense that one must continually put one's wealth to productive use in order to deserve it. That means the squirreling away of wealth is stealing. Owning wealth is having the right to allocate society's resources. Clearly, society thinks that right atrophies if not exercised productively.
> Bitcoin
Ah, I figured there was some boosterism about sneak its way into the conversation.
Creating money is wrong because it benefits those who have the power to create money vs. those who can't. It's only ethically acceptable because people don't understand it, or don't have any choice.
"One must continually put one's wealth to productive use". It's not something that should be forced on people. One should have the ability to save for a bad day and hedge against volatility in the economy. One should also have the ability to spend less in order to save the environment. You can buy gold etc. but then you miss out on the currency aspect, i.e you can't spend it easily.
And yes, obviously I'm talking about Bitcoin because it's the hardest asset ever created, and will replace fiat currencies whether you like it or not. I'm not talking about gold standard, because gold failed as money already. There aren't other options as far as I know.
> Creating money is wrong because it benefits those who have the power to create money vs. those who can't. It's only ethically acceptable because people don't understand it, or don't have any choice.
It's actually the opposite, it depends on what to do with the created money.
Creating 1M$ to give to every American is an effective transfer of wealth from Bezos to everyone else, because his billions are worth less relatively.
Creating the same 1M$ per capita and giving that to banks that buy Amazon stock is a transfer of wealth to Bezos.
Only wealth inequality matters, the numbers printed on the bills are just fictions.
In a democratic society, people have a choice. Perhaps they don't understand their options, but it's clearly up for debate, as we're doing now.
> spend less in order to save the environment
That's an ironic argument, given the proposal of Bitcoin as the alternative.
The choice to not expand the money supply is as much an intervention as expanding it, with equally predictable consequences. If the money supply contracts relative to demand, people will reduce their investment and consumption activity. That's generally seen as undesirable, except to the extent that the investment and consumption has negative externalities.
A steady, low inflation rate is necessary for a healthy economy. Otherwise you'd get a Bitcoin situation where everyone is busy HODLing and never spending.