Originally Posted by
Endus
That speculation fundamentally involves the growth of wealth, over time.
If you were to take any particular moment in time, you could theoretically assess the precise value of every form of wealth in the world at that moment. That value, whatever it may be, will always be finite. Hypotheticals about possible future growth do not and indeed, can not change that.
And I'm using "wealth" very specifically, not "dollars". I'm not talking about money supply; money is just a convenient medium of exchange of and quantification for wealth. That matters, obviously, but that's where we get into the problems of just adding currency to the money supply; the collective wealth in society doesn't change, and because of that, the value of a particular dollar relative to that wealth shrinks, because even fiat currencies are predicated on something. This particular action is a lot more complex than I'm making it out to be, honestly, I'm trying to summarize, but that's the root of why just printing a few hundred trillion dollars to prop up your economy never works; the economy fundamentally works off wealth, not currency, and boosting the money supply only affects currency, not wealth. This is also why we often use historical comparisons by talking about "in 2020 dollars" or whatever; assessing "how rich was Howard Hughes" is an exploration of wealth, relative to society, and you need to eliminate the variable of the value of a dollar to make those comparisons make any sense at all.
When I'm talking "wealth", I don't just mean currency, I mean land, I mean treasures (cultural, artistic, historical, bullion, what have you), I mean all forms of legitimately saleable property of any kind whatsoever. This is, by comparison, why we don't consider a poor family with 18 kids to be "wealthy" because we could consider the black market value of those children if sold as slaves/organs/whatever; that's evil as fuck and illegal, and thus it would be improper to assess those children as "wealth" to begin with. They're not legitimately saleable property. At least, not today.
Long story short; I have no interest in "theoretically infinite". I care about "finite in practice". Besides, people really need to hold off on using "infinite". The solar system's resources aren't infinite. The Milky Way's resources aren't infinite. The observable Universe's resources are not infinite. Even if we could commodify everything, that's still not "infinite wealth". And we're still stuck on this one rinky-dink planet and kind of doing an arse job of exploiting its resources without choking on the byproducts.