Grandfather bought 2 blocks of Manhattan for bag of wampum, 3 hawk feathers and a hammer.
Methinks money supply must simply be relatively adequate (optimal) to facilitate volume and velocity of all transactions and store of value for all entities, with larger or smaller than optimal money supply creating pressure for decreasing or increasing it’s value.
Only mistake gov’t or central bank can make is having way too much or way too little causing inflation (too much money chasing goods and services) or high interest rates (too little liquidity to lending will demand higher rates).
Other than that, if I run my little business and inflation and interest rates are reasonable, I can conduct my transactions and i’m happy.
Currency is a quite small percentage of the total money supply, so printing twice as much as usual is not nearly as bad as these bailouts, where ma gov’t is putting money in somebody’s account and issuing Treasury debt to back it up, i.e., borrowing the money. Most dollars I earn and spend I never actually hold any currency, they could be units, or whatever. The only pain would be if they lose value very fast (high inflation) so that dollars I earned were worth less when I spent them a month later and my raises don’t come through as fast as price increases - ouch !
But from a national perspective, we should strive to keep the nations currency from losing it’s value, and the key driver in that is our national efficiency, how much output we get from our inputs. That will determine the work we need to do and the work other nations need to do to produce goods and services when we trade. If we can work 1 hour days, and another country as to work 14 hour days, and we live in nice houses and they live in huts, it is our national efficiency that is making the difference.
Every internal tax burden we place on ourselves, meaning every time the gov’t spends money, adds to our cost of living, without giving us a new toy or a nice meal (hey, I didn’t order Tax!). That all adds to what our citizens need to earn in order to get by. Thus, it may increase the amount of work they need to do to create the products and services they create, i.e., if you need to take a part-time job to supplement, or it may force them to cut their spending to afford rent. In either case, you wind up with less for how many hours you work.
In a wealthy country, citizens can easily make enough to live very comfortable lives; the country has a very efficient system of converting inputs to outputs (goods and services). A great example of burden on our comfortable citizens is environmental regulation: it is an extra burden that costs time and material to overcome. But, of course, in the long run, we can’t pollute ourselves into oblivion, or who would want to live here ? So we have to balance between needing some government and keeping as much of what we earn as possible.
Harping on currency is kind of a side show. Money supply must be adequate, but efficiency is where the whole game is won or lost.
In one Freeper’s opinion...
Despite a flawed currency, productivity and generally free markets have led to a high standard of living in the US.
It does not follow from that fact though, that we should therefore necessarily continue to maintain the flawed currency and the unnecessary centrally controlled, monopolistic monetary system.
The Fed money czars believe that they possess knowledge enough to improve upon the local decisions made by millions of people interacting in the market and therefore should maintain the authority to manipulate money supply and interest rates so as to improve the efficiency of the economy. They are wrong.
Spending intellectual energy pointing out the lunacy of this sort of thinking, as pervasive and entrenched and unquestioned as it is, is worthwhile. An increase in productivity from an economy NOT hampered by a flawed monetary system, and WITHOUT all of the dislocations produced by wild business cycle swings, could be the result!