you hate rich people

I do, and this probably clouds my judgement.

Now to get to the actual economics:

Investing in the productive economy hasn't yielded a positive return for the last ten years

Given stock price trends I can't see how this is true. Can you elaborate? Even Treasuries are yielding 3-odd percent in the face of 2-odd percent inflation.

unless you want all behavior to shift toward consuming all real resources immediately, including "seed corn", you have just as much an interest in seeing an economy strike a balance between present an future consumption

The wealth of a nation is not some fixed quantity; it's its aggregate production of goods and services. There's not anything we can "run out of" that's required for people to trade, barter, etc. Am I missing something?

Sure, there are finite resources we could run out of, like oil. But attempting to restrict the total size of the economy in an effort to conserve those particular resources seems awfully suboptimal. (It also seems doomed to fail in an economy consisting of humans). Better to attack those particular resource usages through taxation, policy, subsidizing alternatives, etc.

Try to bear with me; and I will try to remember where I am. This is the first time I've met a hard-money advocate on the Internet who also [presumably, given our venue] cares about map-territory correspondence.

if you want to paint me as a racist

I apologize; that was not my intent. Even here one must be very careful about any statements involving race, and I was not nearly careful enough.

The entire concept I was trying to get at is one I think worthy of discussion. Let's see if I can unpack it non-offensively:

1) [Economic] conservatives generally consider poor people an out-group (often even when accountancy would consider said person poor) 2) Said conservatives are almost universally white 3) Everybody on Earth considers people of other races an out-group 4) Everyone on Earth wishes to help their in-group before their out-group, if they wish to help out-groups at all 5) In the USA, poverty is highly correlated with being black and/or Hispanic, for a variety of reasons, including failure to choose the proper parents

As far as I can tell none of those statements are controversial, or paint you (or any other) individual person in a negative light. Please correct me if I am wrong about that.

It seems to me that #2-5 could have a large influence on the apparent paradox in #1 (the "why do poor white folks often favor upwards redistribution?" problem).

Edit: Upon reflection, I'll withdraw the entire sub-topic as "too mind-killing". Besides that property, it's orthogonal to the question under discussion: "Is a hard quantity limit on a medium of exchange a feature or a bug?"

Investing in the productive economy hasn't yielded a positive return for the last ten years,

It depends on what you measure. Risk-free returns, maybe. Risky investments tend to do very well in expectation.

and yes, it's fair to expect the market to compensate you for deferring consumption because society is decidedly not indifferent between whether you consume resources now or later.

It would be nice to see an argument for this.

([U]nless you want all behavior to shift toward consuming all real resources immediately, including "seed corn", you have just as much an interest in seeing an economy strike a balance between present an future consumptio[n])

It seems that the economy is striking a sensible balance right now, with risk-free assets yielding about zero return and risky assets possibly yielding more. You'll not see any consumption/depreciation of capital, because if willingness to save falls then rates of returns will rise.

And getting people to invest in productive enterprises under threat of their money withering away is pure Machiavellianism

It's not. Currency "withers away" because it is effectively a risk-free asset which can be exchanged on demand for real resources (i.e. it has zero maturity) and its returns are standardized over large time-spans, including episodes of distress such as financial crises (whereas other assets are priced by the market and their returns might fall in such circumstances). This is pretty much the highest possible quality you could ask of any asset, and returns are adjusted accordingly. Bank accounts and money-market funds also have some of these qualities, but they have countervailing issues, and the interest they pay is meagre anyway.