theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
The only way I can make sense of it is if it's a problem of hoarding cash.
Assuming that it's better to have economic activity than not, your economy might falter if too many people are hoarding too much cash. You want them to cut open their mattresses, pull out fat stacks of bills, and go buy stuff. Putting an expiration date on cash would incentivize people to not hoard cash.
But that doesn't seem to be the problem Our Hero was trying to solve. In fact, it's not clear to me that he was trying to solve any problem at all, except one in his imagination:
Assuming that it's better to have economic activity than not, your economy might falter if too many people are hoarding too much cash. You want them to cut open their mattresses, pull out fat stacks of bills, and go buy stuff. Putting an expiration date on cash would incentivize people to not hoard cash.
But that doesn't seem to be the problem Our Hero was trying to solve. In fact, it's not clear to me that he was trying to solve any problem at all, except one in his imagination:
More than a century ago, a wild-eyed, vegetarian, free love-promoting German entrepreneur and self-taught economist named Silvio Gesell proposed a radical reformation of the monetary system as we know it. He wanted to make money that decays over time. Our present money, he explained, is an insufficient means of exchange. A man with a pocketful of money does not possess equivalent wealth as a man with a sack of produce, even if the market agrees the produce is worth the money.
“Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether,” Gesell wrote in his seminal work, “The Natural Economic Order,” published in 1915, “is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether.”
[From the article linked in the OP.]
It seems like this guy just had some very heterodox and weird ideas about wealth and value, and wanted expiring money for doctrinaire aesthetic reasons. Probably "self-taught economist" had something to do with it.“Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether,” Gesell wrote in his seminal work, “The Natural Economic Order,” published in 1915, “is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether.”
[From the article linked in the OP.]