Why Not Perennial Stimulus?

On a long walk from home tonight I got a chance to mull something over that's been in my brain for a while. Namely that since the economy is a manmade system that one would hope is meant to maximize at first survival and second pleasure for all people, then why not make sure that always happens. Of course, this presupposes that as fact. Someone else might say that our economic system sets up fiefdoms and elites, but that is another posting.

In any case, it seems to me that most people enjoy working, especially when they are adequately rewarded and the job makes some sort of sense, in that the worker can feel some psychic sort of reward as well as material. And it also seems to me that there is lots of stuff all over the place, enough factories and fields as well as brainpower to produce as much gadgets, food and art as we can handle. It seems that instead of goods being scarce, as in the old days of the 19th century and earlier, it is money that is scarce.

And yet money is an ENTIRELY made up thing. It exists and has value because and to the extent that people believe that it exists and has value. Even gold has little intrinsic value, yet we are so inculcated in its value that we laugh at early native Americans when we read about how they valued gold much less than did Columbus and his old world companions as they entered a new world. Another belief by the way is land. We are all taught that Indians were somehow defective for 'selling' Manhattan for $24 worth of trinkets, as the story goes, and it's a big joke. Yet for people who had no concept of land having any sort of value, except as something to take care of while they were borrowing it from their god, it must have been nice to get the trinkets for what they would consider free.

In any case, this posting, which is to be continued, is to make the case that the government should print as much money as is needed, with the only problem being how to justly distribute it without destroying the normal everyday incentives that capitalism has taught us to feel is natural.