We've already got half of that, it is called inflation. Anyone who tries to accumulate wealth by holding money in a bank account will either die young or poor.

Anyone who tried to hold cash through COVID probably isn't going to do too crash hot either, there is a lot more money around now than there used to be.

The problem is that people try to invest their money, it’s worth than saving and end up making markets like real estate an investment asset as opposed to a human right. People always need to get richer.

"problem"? I argue that a healthy economy should allow people to invest and defer consumption until they want to consume.

You want to invest in productive activities (companies hiring more workers or buying more machines, paving roads, building libraries) rather than unproductive ones (land and property speculation, stock speculation, buy-to-let rent-seeking, etc)

Paving roads is not an investment unless there's some sort of asset that you have equity in that will appreciate by your doing. But apparently you would condemn this as a form of "speculation".

The desire to tax accumulated wealth is equivalent to the desire to tax saving and deferred consumption. People like to dance around this point but it's difficult to avoid how abhorrent this is when it's properly framed.

What in the actual —

I specifically mentioned paving roads as an example of productive investment, how can you possibly claim I'm "condemning it as speculation"?

It's not that investment is bad, but that asset bubbles are bad even for the health of the long term investment landscape.

If only someone could profit off bubbles while at the same time deflating them...

Sure, but this is not the job of the monetary system. The purpose of money is to facilitate economic transactions.

All I’m seeing in your healthy economy is disparity.

The irony is that inflation is too low.

Investing, in the sense that there will be a physical company in the real world, with paid employees doing productive work so that consumers can have services, goods or infrastructure is absolutely fantastic. We want more of this.

Investing, in the sense that the company whose stock you are buying does absolutely nothing to justify the stock growth is absolutely horrifying.

However, the good news is that the person selling the stock now has money and that person should better figure out how to do the first type of investing or they end up suffering from inflation.

Expiring money sounds hard to enforce. It clearly wouldn't expire after it was spent or transferred. So how do you guarantee that it is spent/transferred to something that isn't a savings vehicle?

Of course the money would flow to safe havens an accumulate there. Besides all the known issues with UBI, a populists' favorite.

This thread demonstrates vividly how little the average person understands about economics and finance, even in a place like HN.

>So how do you guarantee that it is spent/transferred to something that isn't a savings vehicle?

Would you sell your gold for expiring money? The exchange rate would be much worse than the regular one.

Hyperinflation basically achieves this.

> Hyperinflation basically achieves this.

I don't think so. I think the idea they want the money to lose its value only if someone hoards it. If it's spent quickly enough, it retains its full value now and in the future. That's not how hyperinflation works.

Hyperinflation is an economy wide collapse in production though.

If every human in the nation lost trust in the currency but there was enough production capacity to feed everyone then exports would rise until the currency appreciates to normal levels again. However, most nations suffering from hyperinflation don't have enough products to export in the first place.

I suppose you pay it as taxes, or banks pay it as interest to the central bank. It does seem odd though.

Why would anyone use a currency that disappears? They will just store their money in some other form, then transfer it to govcoin when they have to pay taxes.

Using and storing are not the same thing. I think the whole point is that the storing of money is considered harmful.

Which is odd to consider, since the whole concept of money is 'storing' something in a fungible way, but still worth thinking about. To what extent does 'money' actually provide an improvement over 'commonly understood capacity to kick your head in', which is another sort of power a person or organization might have? Clearly if there's no money then there's the more immediate physical threat of force, or a more charming interaction like giving someone food or shiny rocks. Money permits an abstraction of this, so what is it incentivizing over the more primitive modes of interaction?

Huh. That IS interesting. It'd suit me right down to the ground, I'm always building stuff.

It also makes it the best possible time for 'pitch a wild idea that's going to be the next great business'. I still think that post-50s wealth created Silicon Valley: relative to how things are now, people were absolutely coddled and had tons of disposable income and spare time, which they used to pursue things like the Altair (a seemingly unproductive activity).

This became the democratization of something important, and it's taken this long for the power to swing back to capital holders.

Why just PERSONAL bank accounts? To disincentivize being a person?

A negative interest rate also leads people to ask the bank for a loan instead of patiently sparing money, and as far as I understand banks love this (more power upon people and free money!).

Negative interest loans for consumers would be very interesting.

Assuming we allow every citizen to borrow $1000 at -1% then the effect is very similar to helicopter money because the value of the debt is being eroded by inflation and you have to pay less back than you borrowed.

I think there are/has been negative interest mortgages in Denmark[1]. And actually, after the first shock, when you have thought it through, there is not that much interesting in negative rates.

Unless you have so spotless opsec that you dare store a mortgage's worth of cash somewhere for decades (and you get that much cash in first place in negative rate environments - I doubt banks are giving you that without really good excuses), you need to invest the money somewhere. Bank accounts? Of course, you get even more negative rates there. Stocks? Well, it is not that different to positive rates, you take quite some risk there. Houses? Well, that's what mortgages are for. But assuming a 100k mortgage, is that really so fundamentally different if you need to gather 99k instead of 101k from somewhere in 10 year's time?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/aug/13/danish-bank-la...