Commenting on “LET THEM FAIL”

My contribution to the discussion of LET THEM FAIL, at Café Hayek:

In several comments I sense a confusion between “wealth” and “money”.

The original post uses effective rhetoric. Saying “we’re going to run out of money” slams the idea home.

Some, I think, understand the shorthand, while others get lost in the definitions of money. We will not run out of units of account. We will likely see our store of value diminished, and this will alter our means of exchange.

But what really matters is the wealth that money represents. And the current policy is to eat our wealth instead of create more. Eating wealth leaves us collectively poorer, but more equal. Yay for equality.

Bankruptcy can arrest the consumption of wealth, and opens opportunity for wealth creation. Sadly, terrifyingly, at the same time we are eating our wealth, policy is aimed at limiting the creation of new wealth and punishing those who do succeed.

We are aimed at shortage and deprivation. The measure of our starvation in dollars, yen, or troy ounces, matters less to the hungry man than creating a meal.