Sunday, June 20, 2010

World Currency Collapse Explained in 3 Minutes

The makers of "The Front Fell Off" and "The Games" are back with a brand new invention. This time they're out to explain the current state of various European economies/governments. It's billed as "World Collapse Explained in 3 Minutes" but it's more specifically about governments and currencies. The term "World Collapse" just seems problematic.


Spoiler: the entire "Who's on First" scenario only comes about when a nation's currency is not backed by a tangible, limited resource such as gold or silver. When money becomes decoupled from anything physical (other than paper), then governments are free to spend as much as they want. How are they going to pay it all off? Print more money.

I'd call this "Tax on the Ignorant". That's to say that if the government raised taxes by 20% to legitimately pay for a bunch of crap there would be outrage. People would protest, they'd question the expenditures, things would probably get cut. If, however, they simply print more money, the public is still paying for it but they're not smart enough to care. When the thousand dollars I have in the bank goes down in value by 50% in 10 years, that's ok. The number of dollars in the bank still says "$1000", so everything 's fine. And when that amount goes down in value by 50% over the next 10 years and so on, and so on, the number of dollars is still 1000 which is still the same amount, right?

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