The U.S might be making brain dead decisions, but its economy can accommodate lots of such before it sinks into hyper inflation.
Absolutely, but it can't accommodate an infinite amount of stupid decisions and money printing. We are currently riding off of previous successes and a previously strong economy. Prior to the 2008 crash, the Fed's balance sheet was sitting at around $0.85 trillion. 15 years later, it now sits at almost $9 trillion. This means that in the last 15 years, we've printed 9x more money than we had in the entire history of the US before 2008. This is clearly unsustainable.
as an altetrnative to owning bitcoin i suppose someone could own gold or silver. those are also inflation hedges.
True, but harder to safely store where you can easily access it, harder to spend, difficult for the average person to verify, and almost impossible for the average person to subdivide as needed to buy goods. All of this is very easy with bitcoin.