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60 sats \ 4 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 26 Nov \ parent \ on: Could an Increase in the Supply of Gold Cause a Boom-Bust Cycle? econ
As long as people had to work to extract the gold, I don’t think there is a problem. The miners, again, are exchanging something for something. The asteroid scenario, if the gold was really easily obtained may cause inflation, but not the same as stealing it by force (Conquest).
I agree that it's ethically different. There's nothing unjust about this kind of inflation, but it will disrupt savings/investment in a systematic way, which is what causes business cycles.
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Is the quantity of new-found gold large enough to drastically increase the supply of gold? Perhaps, the amount of gold to be mined at any one time is not marginally great enough to cause huge percentage swings in the price of money (interest and such).
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It certainly could be. There isn't all that much mined gold on Earth and many asteroids have been found with orders of magnitude more.
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However, we cannot quite grasp them yet and extract the metals. That is for the future and is quite unpredictable.
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