I’m greener than a 3-dollar bill when it comes to economics. My outlook and inquiries tend to be overly simple. For example, I ask myself, when someone has intellectual property - no tangibles other than sounds, words, etc. - and a population takes enough interest to spend money on it, where does the money come from, and where does it go? The zero-sum outlook would keep the number of dollars static. But we print more dollars. Does not a growing economy require more dollars? How arbitrary is the assignment of value between a dollar and its object?
It is all somewhat complicated to me on the one hand, and yet my questions are merely those of a layman who lives hand to mouth, one day to the next, sometimes wasting money with regrets, sometimes not. I’ve been a solid contributor to the brewers of Hamm’s for a number of years now.
Fester Chugabrew, you’ve reminded me of a theme I used to write about, but haven’t lately. I should revisit the issue.
The subject you bring up is absolutely right - government can’t print the number of dollars to cover last year’s economy, it has to print the number of dollars to cover today’s economy, as value is constantly invented.
I like to use examples like the painter or the carpenter in my illustrations... Here’s an example, if you’re interested...
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/cannibalizing_capital.html