Quote from: brush242 on February 20, 2014, 11:22:10 PM

Quote from: Johnny Bitcoinseed on January 24, 2014, 11:20:01 PM

What your saying is along the lines of: lets end poverty by simply giving everyone on earth who is poor One Million Dollars!

This, basically, sums up why this and similar ideas are stillborn (and always will be), even with all the machinations being suggested here.

The reason is very simple, whether you give everybody $1mm, or mandate the minimum wage at $500/hr, or add a bunch of zeros before the decimal point, or any other way of handing it out, in essence a combination of two things will always happen. 1) You devalue money (call it hyperinflation if you will), and 2) demand skyrockets for everything. Instantly.

What that means is that in a matter of days, prices for goods and services will explode by approximately the same order of magnitude of the amount you skew the system. In other words, in no time flat, the price for a gallon of milk (hovering at say $4.00, today) will hover around $40,000. Which means that the net purchasing power of the poor hasn't really changed at all. This will happen for every single good and service at the same time.

THAT is the fundamental flaw with all of these schemes. Since supply and demand define equilibrium, and since all prices always hover around equilibrium (except when skewed by gov't force (law, regulation, import duties, et cetera) which never increases supply) no one is any better off than they were.

Keep this in mind: if you are going to have to force me to participate in your ideas, that means they suck. Badly. There is a ~reason~ that the pillboxes in East Germany were pointed inward.

I agree with the gist of what you are saying, but there is a way to have a voluntary system that empowers all of humanity who wish to participate with no possibility of inflation.