Also you can’t earn interest or generate on money sitting under a mattress.
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You’ve neatly outlined the problem with having a gold standard. People who tout the gold standard often do so with the idea that the price of gold is somehow inherent to gold, and that it’s an eternal and unchangeable stable commodity. Of course it’s not. So a gold standard either accepts the possibility of wild price fluctuations that occasionally crash the economy, or a gold standard uses a central bank to regulate the price of gold to provide stability. If you have the latter, you don’t have a gold standard, you have very shiny fiat currency.
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He wouldn’t live in Galt’s Gulch. He would live in a shanty town down a dirt path behind a hill where it doesn’t spoil the view.
And part of his job is not being seen, if he is he won’t be paid, so he has to clean the entire town between 3-5 AM or he still won’t be paid because he didn’t complete the job.
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You’re comparing the current number of bitcoins to the potential number of dollars? Not only doesn’t this make sense, it’s not true. There isn’t an “infinite potential amount of USD.”
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Didn’t Rand have to invent a magic free energy machine to make Galt’s Gulch work?
Yeah, they are really pretty. 
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Yup and magic robot labor
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She also had to pointedly ignore that the obvious lesson to take from the plot (such that there is) is - Strike action works, but only when you act in solidarity.
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I think it’s even worse than that. Deflation was bad enough for debtors when we were already on a gold standard. But today, money is created by debt, either government or private. This is true even before you add on fractional reserve banking’s money creation process (and with the reserve requirement now being 0%…). In other words, when you pay down debt, money changes hands, but over time in the economy as a whole that money ceases to exist. Federal government debt is the only reason its even possible for there to be more money (M2, not wealth) than private debt in the economy.
Sustained deflation makes lending by the rich unnecessary. Hold onto your cash, and you automatically get richer, risk-free. If you’re a business owner, reducing availability of finance hurts upstart competitors more than you. And as debtors struggle to pay down debts (despite lower prices reducing their nominal income), they reduce the money supply, causing a spiral of accelerating deflation and more and more people going bankrupt. So even if you think leaving the gold standard was a mistake, it’s very much also a “riding the tiger” situation.
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I like the idea that Rand’s novel “Anthem” is secretly a sequel to Atlas shrugged:
https://bradhicks.livejournal.com/393124.html
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Sounds familiar.
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To be fair I didn’t. But Rand isn’t, or at least wasn’t, taken at all seriously outside America.
I think now there are some tech bros who can read English but have never encountered literature or philosophy and so find her other than risibly, laughably, shit.
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“Hardly anybody knows this” is a phrase The Real Estate Swindler regularly uses to repeat facts generally known and understood.
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What? It has nothing to do with wearing out that a monitor I can now buy for £250 cost £800 5 years ago, despite them being largely functionally identical.
To be charitable; Bitcoin is non inflationary because there will never be enough of it to chase too few goods and services.
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This. The concept of the gold standard is fundamentally the aether of economics. It’s for people who think you can nail down everything to a solid floor, which you can magic out of the universe. Physicists abandoned that idea with Einstein, and macroeconomists have done the same thing, ultimately because all prices are relative.
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I worked in a pawn shop were I bought these and similar at seven cents on the dollar, because NO ONE will give you face value. They feel like very cheap plastic. Not as pretty in person.
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I cannot give this enough likes.
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really, i think the books we setup for kids reflects our society.
there’s so many deeply meaningful and challenging books for a fourteen year old - that ayn rand is even in there shows some serious issues with the power dynamics in america.
and i say that as a fan of her books, despite everything that’s wrong with them.
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