Quote from: Impaler on April 15, 2013, 07:38:07 PM

Quote from: kjj on April 15, 2013, 11:42:16 AM

This is a common claim that looters like to make to justify their theft.

It turns out to be exactly 180 degrees from truth. The reality is that savers are doing a service for the market, not the other way around. By deferring consumption, you are allowing the market to invest the resources that you would have consumed in the construction of new productive assets. Growing the productive base is a good thing, and should be rewarded.

Saving is not the same as INVESTING, saving is simply withdrawing currency from circulation and dose not result in any increase in future production, in fact all evidence points to a reduction in future production when this is done. An investment is a form of consumption, capital goods are purchased, buildings constructed etc, this adds to the stock of capitol. On the other-hand saving simply results in an unconsumed surplus of goods (generally consumer goods) and this reduces the returns of those that produced them causing them to lower production, reduce labor costs and scrap excess capital that can't be productive. Thus some of the collective stock of capitol is destroyed needlessly, years later this must all be rebuilt to accommodate the new consumption, the wasted capitol if it had been utilized would have lead to an even larger production in the future, this is why boom-and-bust is bad.

Yes, thank you. What was missing from these forums was yet one more person parroting the stock Keynesian party line. You even share the perversely keynesian habit of confusing money with wealth in one sentence, and understanding them as distinct things in the next.

I don't point out your obvious Keynesianness as an ad hominem, but rather to simplify the refutation. The school of economic thought that you follow is not taken as gospel here. Merely repeating what you've found in your textbooks will not win you many arguments here.

At this time, I only wish to address two things specifically.

When you save, you are deferring consumption. You are holding the the token representation of wealth, rather than the wealth itself. The wealth itself is then free to go where the price signals tell it to go, whether to someone else's consumption, or to capital formation depending on the overall market.

Boom and bust is indeed bad, or at least sub-optimal. However, it is not caused by savings, it is caused by meddling in the price signals. Keynesians tend to forget that everything they preach involves suppressing or enhancing price signals, making it impossible for the market to provide correct information.