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That's a market calculation that requires no public policy solution.
The segments of society you outlined are only snapshots of a moment in time. Money solves the problem because it allows the worker to transfer the value he produced while he was working to himself when he retires. That's the redistribution. There's no need for a third party to take money from working age people and micromanage the flow of currency ahead of its voluntary market-appointed time.
If we're talking about disabled people who might go their entire lives as net consumers through no fault of their own, literally just go to a Bitcoin meetup and beg. That's the healthiest way to manage redistribution for people in desperate need, because we are 1,000x more generous and more efficient than the state. But statist programs target us as their source of revenue, so money that could have actually helped someone gets wasted on political activism.
I disagree with this point:
bitcoins' awesome ability to move undetected within a persons head is not the same as moving real goods and services across a border
Bitcoin is commodity money. It is a real good, not a receivable, and holding it is a real service because you're doing the mental labor of making a wise investment while delaying consumption. The structure of the monetary policy and the lack of a viable alternative guarantees that people will be willing to trade for it so we can ignore the theoretical abstraction that says maybe someday nobody will want it and then it will be worth nothing. Being aware of this, at this stage of adoption, is effectively work and that's why Bitcoin "gains" are deserved compensation for being smart and productive.
The segments of society you outlined are only snapshots of a moment in time. Money solves the problem because it allows the worker to transfer the value he produced while he was working to himself when he retires.
no it doesn't. If you can't grasp this I don't have the time or energy to explain it to you.
Try sketching up the various people over time, and goods vs asset market -- where, for simplicity, the only asset is money. This is basic monetary economics 101.
At the end of the day, you're still exchanging work <-> pieces of paper (or in our bitcoin case, sats).
It does though.
I make a sandwhich and earn 10 sats. When I retire I trade 10 sats for someone else to make me sandwhich. I produced 10 sats worth of value, now I'm consuming 10 sats worth of value. There's no other redistribution necessary.
Unless we're concerned with everyone trying to retire at the same time? If there's an imbalance there it's probably because the state got involved in family planning.
OK, my short-sighted friend. tl;dr = real stuff comes from real production, regardless of the money we're using. If there's (increasingly) nobody around to create, the consumers' money will just fight over whatever little stuff there is. Prices bid up, money's value down, and we still redistributed value, only differently
Before I spend 45 minutes or whatever carefully sketching out a simple overlapping generations model, real-vs-nominal, and what happens when the age distribution gets top-heavy (fucksake, @Undisciplined is gonna make me do it, I'm sure): think through what happens in your example
- when 10 people having earned 10 sats each across their working careers (total money stock = 100, all sitting in these retirees' hands) turn around to purchase a sandwich — and there's only a single middle-age dude making sandwiches, able only to make 1 sandwich a day. Result: price of sandwich bid up to, I dunno, 50-100 sats, and the retirees who could amass a coalition share the spoils of that one sandwich and the rest starve.
- How did your impeccably held and closely guarded sats retain value?
My friend used to quip: at the end of the day you're still handing over Apple stocks for apples — only the relative exchange rate changes
But that kind of demographic crisis would only occur outside of a Bitcoin standard, so it is fundamentally a currency problem. Without statism and war, populations stabilize to a point where you wouldn't even think to consider the risk of such a problem.
In that situation, you just have to wait it out and cycle through famine until the debts due to the legacy system are cleared.
Without statism and war, populations stabilize to a point where you wouldn't even think to consider the risk of such a problem.
nice cop-out, defeding an incorrect statement with a handwavy, unprovable hypothesis. I don't particularly disagree, but do you honestly think our demographic stagnation/future decline is due to statism and war??
Absolutely. The government is constantly employing all manner of population controls to raise and lower birthrates in service to its vision of what it considers ideal constituents. We're all hybrids made half in the image of God and half in the image of State.
Aaaand there you passed the threshold from quirky to retarded. Have a nice day, sir.
no, think through this properly.
And ignore money, because it's just a veil for real goods and services #737272, #839329
If one segment of society makes and creates everything -- let's call them "the labor force" -- and another segment of society consumes (kids, retired, out of labor force; but for now just think of retired), then the surplus of production (=what labor force creates) has to somehow be shared with those who only consumed.
Ergo, the dude's point.