What do you expect government wants to do with all that stolen purchasing power anyway? It's government, it's not going to buy itself piles and piles of caviar with it... the only people with any percentage in stealing anothers purchasing power are private interests, not government. I happen to be against a lot of what government does, the military-industrial-congressional complex for instance. But even there, who gets the money the government spends on missiles? People that work down at the weapons factory, and the electronics components factory, and the mines and refineries that make the stuff that make said components, and the share-holders that own the Lockheed Martin stocks, and the missile designers and programmers that go home at the end of a long hard day to read Atlas Shrugged again.
Even when government is spending on Evilness it's still just a matter of cycling the same old income around. Shopkeeper pays taxes, taxes buy bread for food-stamps, food-stamp user goes to shop, hands over food-stamp to shopkeeper. The income never really escapes into significant amounts of hookers and blow in boring old government. And even when it does, hooker invests in property, blow-dealer buys stock-options, round and round it still all goes.
Private interests can gain from stolen purchasing power or stolen political rights or economic rites, causing fire-sales of human life and cleaning up. It's why I think 'private interests' should be restrained in certain matters. Here I mention the usual names I like to mention for this sort of point... Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Lockeed Martin, Shell, Haliburton, XE and so on.
Anyway, I try here not to derail yet another thread.
Private interests don't have the power to do it, but government does. The current model assumes that the people can and will prevent private interests from obtaining government power and using it to enrich themselves. That doesn't seem to be working very well right now, and it will be coming to a head within my lifetime. It is a recurring theme throughout history. The question is, will we start the next cycle by saying "And don't do it again!", or by taking the inflationary power away entirely? Or at least until those with a personal memory of this era are dead...
That's a fair point, you don't seem to be an anarcho-capitalist or anything like that.
And if you really think that all spending is the same, why don't you pay your neighbor to dig some holes and then fill them in? After all, it will just cycle the same income around.
I didn't say all spending was the same, it's not. The question is how useful is that expenditure... governments can make bad or corrupt decisions but government expenditure itself is not really a matter of taking from Peter to pay Paul, it can be an effect in the short term but in the long term aggregate demand still equals national income.
It's not about stealing
purchasing power, it's about handling
political power. Spending tax money on missiles is like the government shorting human life itself, sure it might profit down the line when foreign-lives in some dusty backwater are cheaper than now, but that's not really the point is it.
Anyway it's not my job to bother with politics.
justmy2toshi.
