First off, welcome to the forum!
You raise a lot of good questions. I highly recommend checking out The Ultimate Beginner meta-thread. That’s the one-stop place to start. (Be sure to check out the welcome link.) You’ll probably want to bookmark it, as it’s a major collection of links for things you might want to look into in the future and refer back to.
I’ll go ahead and give you some direct response to your inquiries, but I can tell you right now if you’re geniunely interested in the answers to this stuff, you’ll need to do some reading!
This is a misleading question. It presupposes that debt requires inflation of the money supply (which leads to a devaluation of the currency), or at least necessarily leads to it. This is not the case.
So to answer your question, yes, it is entirely possible that productivity can be increased through the use of debt financing to increase capacity. This is largely what occured during the period known as the “Gilded Age”. You’ll often hear people today claim we’re not in such bad shape because the US had quite a bit of debt back in those days too. The difference they neglect is that back then, that debt was financing growth in our productive capacity…through manufacturing expansion and other endeavours. More recently our debt has been used for consumption. You might check out Robert Higg’s book on the time period (the articles in the links section provide a nice overview.)
You’re right on both counts…but don’t confuse the two. There is a lot of wealth in the US, and Americans do consume a lot of stuff…but don’t forget about all the debt you just got through mentioning. A large amount of the consumption Americans enjoy is financed through the borrowing…which means it doesn’t all represent actual wealth. Peter Schiff had a famous exchange with Art Laffer on this very subject. (Notice the year of the interview). I’ll leave it to you to decide who was using a more sound economic analysis.
Careful there. You’re right in that there is a relationship between demand and supply, but you’re coming close to making the fallacious Keynesian assertion that demand is the driver of productivity. This is a large part of the root of Keynesian economics, and the basis for an enormous amount of fatally flawed thinking, and therefore, embarassingly wrong forecasts, and dangerously wrong prescriptions.
You can find some discussion and links related to this here.
It sounds like your basic question is, without a parasitical State siphoning away the wealth of the people by force, would the economy that those people make up be larger/ more prosperous/ more productive? Absolutely. I would also add “more peaceful.”
Absolutely. Quite the contrary to what you have been led to believe, having a State does not help this process at all. It can do nothing but distort and hinder this process.
It’s virtually impossible to imagine what a free society would look like and how much more advanced it would be, but just to get an idea, think about your (stereo)typical African tribe in the jungle, and compare it to the wealthiest, most advanced areas of the US. Then multiply by some non-1 whole number and you’ll be on the right track. In other words, if there existed a free society on Earth, it would look alien to us.
One assumes by “regulation” you mean “State mandates”. The answer is no. There is no need for a State at all.
Feel free to follow up with any questions you might have. The more specific you are, the easier it will be to recommend the best resources to aid you.
Once again, welcome