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stephen_g 3 hours ago

That’s not true, because it would have to mean that money is created by the private sector (or just magically springs into existence somewhere) and that taxing it is the only way for the Government to get it.

Money is a created thing, a creature of the state. We maintain certain fictions about it (like “tax to spend”, allowing the market to set bond yields most of the time and keeping track of the outstanding bonds as “government debt”) because people are scared that Governments wouldn’t be controlled enough to manage money creation if they overtly used the powers they have to issue currency… But effectively they still kind of do it…

And while it’s not perfect it’s actually far more stable than attempts at fixed exchange rates and pegging currency to commodities like gold (which always fails eventually, because it doesn’t stand to reason that the amount of gold or any other commodity in a country would correspond to how much money the economy needs. You can set the exchange rate but it always drifts, so those periods tended to swing between big deflation and then inflation, with panics, recessions, and financial crises every few years)

digitaltrees an hour ago | parent [-]

Most money is created by the private sector. Thats was fractional reserve banking is, creating money.