logoalt Hacker News

alright2565today at 4:00 PM3 repliesview on HN

This article over and over describes inflation as a tax or destruction, without backing those claims up. It would be a much stronger article if it focused on the main point rather than having it interspersed with the author's personal opinion of changes in the denominator of a fraction.


Replies

logicchainstoday at 5:57 PM

>This article over and over describes inflation as a tax or destruction, without backing those claims up

Inflation due to money supply increase being like a tax is a fundamental economic result that doesn't need to be rehashed. If you were to counterfeit a trillion dollars and spend it, what happens? You get more things, reducing the remaining supply of things, and everyone else has the same amount of money but chasing a smaller amount of things, so their purchasing power per dollar goes down. It acts as a wealth transfer from other currency holders to yourself. The same applies if the government creates money, but in that case it's called a tax because wealth transfer to the government is termed taxation.

latentframetoday at 4:02 PM

[flagged]

show 1 reply
uticustoday at 4:07 PM

> This article over and over describes inflation as a tax or destruction, without backing those claims up...

C'mon. Whether you agree or not, any time spent in the field will expose you to this philosophy. If you disagree, ignore. There's no need to go through implicit ideas.