Is it moral to counterfit money?

[Dylan_of_Rivia]

@Aristippus

Inflation is aggressive because of the controls on money creation and use.

I’ve never thought about inflation being aggresive, and not just fraud, but you make a good point there.

[Anenome]

You can’t simply conflate money and products and apply the logic of one to another.

[Aristippus]

would not the analogy have to be counterfiting a tree, ie selling fake wood to people? if someone buys the fake wood, there has been fraud. they personaly have been sold something that not the substance they wanted thought they were getting.

Yes, that’s exactly right. But he was saying that it’s theft beyond fraud and I was saying that, concerning the theft part, it is no more theft than is any kind of market competition.

You can’t simply conflate money and products and apply the logic of one to another.

Why not? You do realise that this is MISES.org, right??

[Anenome]

For example: the government is not capable of counterfeiting, they are after all the government.

However, the government can steal value from everyone who holds currency by inflating the currency and buying things with the newly printed bills. They will buy at the previous cash-basis, and the economy will later catch up and adjust to the new monetary supply, which we call inflation, prices rising to account for the amount of money now ‘out there.’

When you counterfeit, as long as those bills are being passed as legitimate, they are stealing value from everyone else and inflating in the same manner.

If the counterfeit bills were caught the first time the counterfeiter tried to pass it as money, it would then be only fraud and not also inflation-theft.

[Anenome]

@Aristippus

You can’t simply conflate money and products and apply the logic of one to another.

Why not? You do realise that this is MISES.org, right??

What’s your point.

[Aristippus]

However, the government can steal value from everyone who holds currency by inflating the currency and buying things with the newly printed bills. They will buy at the previous cash-basis, and the economy will later catch up and adjust to the new monetary supply, which we call inflation, prices rising to account for the amount of money now ‘out there.’

This is only figurative theft. What is actually being stolen? Value? How can this be measured? What is the correct value? State created price inflation is a result of supply and demand in a market that is closed off from competition by government controls. The latter is the problem, not the money creation per se.

What’s your point.

One of the major achievements of Mises’ first important work, The Theory of Money and Credit, was in showing how economic laws apply to money and other goods in the same way.

[billott1]

You have to specify the conditions and what you mean by counterfeiting. In a government monopoly fiat money standard it is of course immoral to counterfeit money. In a free economy money is just another commodity and the producers of money can create as much or as little as they wish. It is up to consumers/users of money to determine which forms and which rates of production are most prefereable. And consumers will pay for the most preferable forms of money while rejecting those forms that least preferable.