When you take out a loan from the bank, they don’t give you money that already exists; they create money by adding to your account a number which represents credit in our socially-accepted system for exchanging value. Then you are expected to pay back that loan with interest.

You must pay off the interest with money that is already in circulation. The credit needed to pay it off was not created when you took out the loan. Only debt was created. And now you must pay off that debt by competing for the money that already exists with others who are also trying to pay off their interest. It’s not a zero-sum game; there is not enough money for everyone to pay off their debt. Our system is based on its losers. The banks profit by sending citizens out to compete for a limited resource that is purely conceptual and of which there is not enough to go around.

You’re saying that counterfeiting two million dollars and using it for goods and services would be taking extra resources, but a person who did that would only be doing what our financial institutions have been doing every day for almost a hundred years. And it would be completely insignificant in comparison to the massive quantities of money dealt with by our world’s banking cartels.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that those “rightful beneficiaries” would still be harmed without our hypothetical counterfeiter. Those resources would still be displaced. They would just be displaced to an individual to whom that money would make a real difference instead of some faceless international banker who is already richer than most people will ever be able to imagine.

2M$ is a negligible amount when divided by a large number but I don’t see the reason to divide by that number.

Personally, I’d be more convinced by an argument that says that you’ll use the money more intelligently for overall good than the average individual and so deserve it. This also runs into flaws when you consider that more than half of people will claim to be above average, but that is a measurement problem. If you are *right* that you will use it better than average, then it doesn’t matter what system is used to confirm that for others.

What if there was a jury of 30 anonymous people you’ve never met, who heard your plea for 2M$, and decided that you indeed would perform great tasks with it? Maybe that’s better than the current method of accumulating money..? Maybe not, but this system doesn’t ignore the cost of potentially misspending it.

So you expect to buy a small house and some food with your $2 million. The house and food can’t magically appear when you print the money. Someone has to work to create them, and someone has to be displaced when you consume them.

Inflation is measured by the Consumer Price Index and the Producer Price Indices. Basically, economists takes a sample of certain predetermined goods and compare the price to the previous year. In an economy as large as ours, even if I used my illicit $2m on nothing but those exact goods, the effect would be far below the margin of error for the measurement. Like I said: literally no effect.

The story is similar for purchasing things. With that money I’d be sustainably spending maybe $80,000 a year. My $2m would most likely be part of a fund on the order of billions, if not close to a trillion. $2m is just noise. With the $80k I’d barely perturb the surface of the deep waters of the economy. A small house, some food, nothing much more.

“If you do figure out a way to print money on the order of a couple million dollars without being detected, then you accrue significant benefit to yourself personally, while doing absolutely no harm to the system.”

This is not true. If you print two million dollars, you will debase the US currency by the amount of two million dollars. This harm will be distributed across a large number of people, but it exists.

To see this another way, consider what you might do with the two million dollars. You will buy goods and services. The amount of goods and services in the world is limited. By causing resources to be redirected to you, you will inevitably cause them to not go where they otherwise would have gone, which is a harm to the rightful beneficiaries. Yes, buying more stuff might cause more stuff to be produced if people react to the increased demand by increasing their working hours, but then you’ve taken people’s time that might otherwise have been spent on something else they value.

Cheers :)

It would very interesting to know the ways in which this idea changed your life. That would make this article more gripping.

Ray