How could hard money societies address mass unemployment?

- Andreas would appreciate your prospective on a topic I've wondering about of late. In the Bitcoin economy where hard money currency and monetary policy defined by code is dominant, how would, or could societies address mass unemployment, and the survival of the workings of commerce in situations such as we are currently facing with COVID-19? Well, I can appreciate concerns about unlimited printing of money, and the priorities of how those funds are expanded. The hyperinflation that was predicted after 2008, hasn't come about, and I haven't seen a compelling or compassionate alternative being presented on the libertarian Austrian side of the argument, do bitcoiners declare this a healthy cleanse, retreat to their citadels and wait for the pandemic to burn itself out at the cost of millions of lives and massive economic destruction? A long question, but thank you so much. The bottom line here is that first of all, I'm not an Austrian economist, nor am I a strict libertarian, or assign those kinds of labels to my political views.

Does financial stimulus work? And the Cantillon effect.

But the thing is that the arguments that this crisis is being somehow solved by this massive injection of money, I think is fundamentally wrong, and I think that's mostly the arguments you'd hear from libertarians and Austrian economists, which is that, the reallocation of money through the Cantillon effect, as it's called, where the rich get richer and income inequality increases massively because of subsidies into the investment markets, which are mostly concentrated among the wealthy, the big businesses that have first in line access to the big banks that have first in line access to capital. This actually has a very specific effect of enriching the rich, and impoverishing the middle class and the lower class and the working class. And so as a result, what exactly is the saving of the economy doing? It's not a saving of the economy, it's building gilded lifeboats for the super rich, to bail themselves out. We've seen, in fact, recently that many of the richest people on the planet have increased their wealth just in the last two months by some $24 billion just off the stimulus, and the increase in concentration of wealth, that is a direct result of this pandemic and the stimulus is happening. Also the idea that hyperinflation didn't come in 2008, sure it did, it came in assets, it became completely unaffordable for anyone to afford student loans, health care or housing for an entire generation of young people while all of the wealth got directed to those who already had wealth invested in the stock market, and other assets that got massively inflated by stimulus.

What are the crisis relief options in a hard money economy?

So again, I think the idea that in a hard money society, what you would end up with is a society without compassion, where everyone would be on their own, I don't think is true. There's no reason why taxation can't work in a hard money society, there's no reason why you can't have representative democracy work. I don't pay taxes only because I will get caught if I don't, I actually believe in the fact that the weakest link, for example, in the pandemic is how healthy my neighbors are. And I think it's important that everybody has a basic quality of life and health, otherwise, the whole of society suffers, which, of course, makes me not a strict libertarian, but that's just a political opinion, so, I'm not sure it's all black and white. I don't think the stimulus has actually saved anything and not made things worse, and I also don't think that in a hard money society, we can solve social problems, and we will be paralyzed because our money will be so awesome. (soft ambient music) - [Andreas] If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe, like and share. All my work is shared for free, so if you wanna support it, join me on Patreon. (soft ambient music) (high-pitched techno music)