Michael, thanks for your critical response with question.
With the advent of free money, there is literally no limit to the amount that can be printed, so it becomes something more like the energy from the sun, it is unlimited, whereas gold is limited.
There appears to have already been printed many times more value in dollars than is stored in all of the gold in the world.
So we have to conclude that issued money is decreasingly representing a static amount of wealth, and yet it is retaining, even increasing its market value.
So it is tending towards becoming more a dynamic mechanism of transport, than a medium of storage, adding value to the planet, by enabling the endeavour of humans, in a similar way as sunlight, the energy of which eventually reaches us via our environment.
Would we try to compute the number of photons “Held” by the sun? Probably not. We are more interested in the rate of photons at any time.
And yet, we meticulously maintain counts of all things perceived to have value.
This obviously throws into question conventional economists’ view of the money supply of a particular currency representing a fixed amount of “Wealth”.
In the presence of a networked humanity equipped with things like the internet, and ai, which enable all humans to create wealth if they are adequately funded, then it starts to make sense that the printing of free money for distribution to all is an essential component of wealth creation, as a species.
Things are different now, even from what they were in 2008 when the previous financial crisis happened.
The value of a dollar in Oz gold is still set by the market as always, by our recognition of its potential to add value to our world, given that gold is a kind of reservoir, which holds a static amount of dollars at any time.
A pile of gold in a store after ten years is still just the same pile of gold, but the world outside moves on, re-defining what we perceive as value.
In the presence of free money, gold holds an ever increasingly smaller amount of currency, relative to the infinite capability of printing more money.
Looking at it mathematically, we’ve always equated the balance of an account with a particular amount of cash, and yet, when cash is in motion, cash value is actually related to an account balance by a derivative relationship.
In the physical world, a generalisation like that would be akin to saying the acceleration of a car is the same thing as its speed, which obviously it isn’t. But with no knowledge of a fundamental difference, we could easily mistake a very slight constant acceleration as being linearly related to the speed.
If the object of the driver of the car is to maintain a linear relationship between speed and acceleration, then for a while, the linear relationship will be maintained, but we know what will happen when the driver realises they can actually accellerate.
The free printing cash mini-bonanza brought about by the pandemic, was like we just accidentally tipped the accelerator, and we are feeling an almost imperceptible blip of acceleration, which manifested as a slight rise in the value of the dollar.
Some points to note; most people have had to work for, struggle for, fight for what they’ve got, because we’ve always worked in the mode of controlled scarcity.
The idea of changing to controlled reputation from controlled scarcity might seem like the devil’s work. How could all of our effort and sacrifice to date have been for nothing?
But it absolutely wasn’t. The industrial revolution, built by controlled scarcity was probably absolutely necessary to give us things like the internet and ai.
But now we have those, they are like our wings as a species.
We have only just started to flap them with a trickle of free money, for most folks.
Turn up the money flow, and we’ll see that bird fly.
But it probably has to be done in agreement between all governments, as isolated currencies trying to do it have always failed in the past, it should probably be ramped up slowly by all.
I hope all of that makes some sense to you and goes a little towards answering your question for now.
I will look forward to your response.
