this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
678 points (98.2% liked)
InsanePeopleFacebook
2603 readers
62 users here now
Screenshots of people being insane on Facebook. Please censor names/pics of end users in screenshots. Please follow the rules of lemmy.world
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's assuming printing money is the default solution. Taxes have existed for longer than that. The earliest taxes were literally a portion of a farmers harvest. You can't just print more food, or gold, or whatever else. Printing money to fund government was never really an option, so positioning taxes as a solution to inflation just doesn't make sense. It's like saying that instead of eating at a restaurant, you could eat roadkill, which you aren't going to do because of disease, and therefore restaurants are a way of reducing disease rather than providing food.
I'm not operating with a model of solutions being "default" or not, so no it absolutely does not. What I'm doing is intentionally ignoring the historical context of how these systems developed to observe how they work in the present moment. Doing so allows me to understand the flaws of the model where money is viewed as a resource, rather than a pure social construct that exists in the minds of those who use it. Resources are limited by physical reality, whereas money flows like a clockwork river who's source is infinite and who's sink has infinite capacity. Changing the ammount of money available too much, too quickly, or in particular ways has negative consequences but it is possible. Resources don't do that.
I'd say they have more to do with entertainment, but they do all of those, yes. It's just a matter of perspective.