Re: The Economy Of Plenty

Brent Allsop (allsop@swttools.fc.hp.com)
Fri, 12 Sep 1997 11:34:06 -0600


EvMick <EvMick@aol.com> commented:

> Course no one would be in Control...and if you screwed up you GET
> screwed...(mother nature is a bitch)..but the Fed hasn't impressed
> me...seems like they cause more problems than they cure...just skew
> the cause and effect relationship so NOONE knows what's going on.

Why would you say this? Before we had the "Fed" controlling
things and things were based on "hard" money or Gold there were
periods of wild inflation when there was plenty of God and periods of
wild deflation when Gold became scarce. Such wild fluctuations often
totally devastated the economy and was very unfair to some and gave
way to much to others arbitrarily based on the Gold supply.

For the last 15 or so years things have been unbelievably
stable with a very consistent small rate of inflation, which is the
ideal. Thanks, largely to the Fed leaders, Volker and Greenspan
during this time. Of course there have been times when the Fed
screwed up, but even these times were fare better than when money was
"hard" and no one controlled it.

Sure money is an invention. It's a token that represents an
amount of work or capital. It's value is roughly the total ammount of
work we can all do or our capital divided by the total amount of
dollars available. To be fair to all, especially from one generation
to the next, this value should remain fairly constant or slightly
inflationary. This requires some kind of control over how many
dollars there are, especially since the total amount of work that can
be done and the ammount of work we all want to be done in any given
year is so dynamic and growing.

Brent Allsop