Printing Money
I have a page on my website where I describe an idea that I had for providing free food and rent to everyone. I have been thinking about the idea in some detail, and I have come up with a system that seems to me like it should work in order to achieve this. This page describes the system that I have come up with.
I do not consider myself an expert on economics. This is what I have come up with after doing a small amount of research and thinking about it as a non-expert. It is definitely possible that I have misunderstood something. If anyone sees any mistakes in my reasoning, please feel free to contact me and let me know which part I have misunderstood.
The Current System
Currently, we have an economic system which depends on the government either collecting taxes or borrowing money in order to have money to spend. Theoretically, it is possible for the government to fund its activities by printing money and spending it, rather than collecting it from someone else, however people usually claim that this will cause inflation. The reason people expect this to occur is because people have more money to spend on things for which there are limited quantities available to be purchased. The competition between the people attempting to buy the same things causes the prices of those things to increase. If these price increases occur across a wide range of goods and services, then it effectively means that the currency is now worth less than it did before. If the currency decreases in value too quickly, this causes the currency to no longer be useful as a store of value. For this reason, most politicians and governments typically claim that they are opposed to printing money in order to fund government activities.
Interestingly, even though politicians and governments say they are opposed, they apparently engage in something called quantitative easing, which involves printing money. However, for the purposes of quantitative easing, the money is only given to people who already own certain financial assets that have started to decrease in value. These assets are usually owned by banks. The money is given to them to make sure those assets do not decrease in value. In a sense, the government is intentionally causing inflation in the value of those specific assets. It is assumed that giving the banks all of this extra cash will eventually, somehow, indirectly result in average people receiving the cash.
In this system, since the banks are the entities that have received most of the cash, they generally provide the cash to other entities by loaning the cash to them. Regular people and other parts of the government can borrow the cash from the bank, however they have to give it back, because it is a loan. It is possible for someone to receive some of the cash without having to pay it back, however in order to do that, you need to convince someone who has borrowed the cash to simply give it to you without expecting it to be returned. This is often done by a person getting a job from someone who has borrowed money from the bank. This includes the government itself, which borrows money from the bank when it has not collected enough money in taxes in order to pay salaries.
A key problem with this system, in my opinion, is that it is effectively a kind of slavery system. Only the banks and wealthy people receive the money that was printed. For regular people to receive any of it, they need to find a job from someone who has borrowed it. Since money is required to purchase food and pay for shelter, people therefore have no choice but to seek some way to obtain money, and therefore have no choice to obtain a job from someone who will have a lot of control over them. This system is made worse by the fact that in many cases, the people who have borrowed the most money are actually not really intending to pay it back, perhaps because they expect the government to bail them out with more printed money, and so they tend to be unethical people. Therefore, ethical people end up becoming economic slaves of unethical people.
My Suggested System
In my opinion, the system should be changed so that it is no longer a system based on economic slavery. For the system to no longer be based on slavery, it has to be the case that any person could reasonably quit their job at any time without worrying about being physically harmed, which is something that can result if a person becomes homeless or becomes unable to afford food. It seems like a way to solve this might be to simply print money and give it to everyone, however inflation really is a valid concern if this is not done carefully.
The fundamental change that I am proposing is that rather than printing money and giving it to people who own financial assets, it is instead printed on demand whenever a person provides a service to someone else, and given by the government directly to the person providing the service. I envision the economy being divided into two parts, the consumer economy, and the business economy.
The Consumer Economy
The way I see it, every person should have a right to be a consumer. This means that there are many things that they should be given for free for them to consume. If something is consumed, then after they obtain the item, they are not left with something that can be immediately resold or traded for a significant value. The fact that the items that they are given are not considered significantly valuable after they obtain them means that they are not able to use them to compete with others when trying to obtain things available in limited quantities. This seems like it should limit inflation in the prices of the things available in limited quantities.
Here are some examples of things that could be free as part of the consumer economy:
Rent
People obviously need a place to live in order to survive. Once rent is paid for their primary residence, a person is not left with something of value that they can resell or trade, because they themselves live in their primary residence. This is not the case, however, for a secondary residence, which they could rent to someone else. Therefore, the government should not pay the rent for a secondary residence.
Food
People obviously need food in order to survive. Once food is eaten, it cannot be resold or traded. Therefore, it should be possible for people to be provided with a certain amount of free food without causing inflation.
Medical Services
People obviously need medical services in order to survive. Once medical services have been provided to a person, that experience can no longer be resold or traded. Therefore, it should be possible for people to be provided with medical services without causing inflation.
Other Services
In general, any service that a person provides for someone else could be free. This could include digital services, like Internet access, or services like Netflix.
Mass-Produced Physical Products
There are many mass-produced physical products which usually do not have significant value if resold, even if they are technically not consumed. This includes things like movies and television shows sold on DVDs and Blu-rays.
Making it Work
I came up with the specific examples that I listed above because I personally want those things for free. However, it seems like there could be a large variety of things that could be available for free, as long as providing the thing for free would not cause inflation. Unfortunately, I cannot think of a way to make it work without the government, or whoever issues the currency, defining the specific categories of things that are available for free, the number of each thing that a person is able to have for free in each category, and the amount of currency that is printed and given to the person or business providing the thing for free. For certain things, like mass-produced physical products such as DVDs and Blu-rays, a person clearly needs to be limited in the number they can have for free in a certain time frame, because otherwise individual people would ask for more than can be physically provided. It also might make sense to place some limits on the things available for free so that people still have an incentive to try to make money in order to buy certain things that they want to purchase, even if they do not require those things for survival.
I am not sure what the best system would be for defining the categories, the prices, and the limits. This is somewhat of an open question and I have been trying to think about how to design the best system. It seems to me that it would be ideal if there was some kind of direct democracy system along with some kind of fancy algorithm, rather than leaving all of the decisions up to politicians. Aside from that, I am not really sure what the best system would be.
All of the things provided for free should be provided for free regardless of whether someone is employed or not. If this is not the case, then the system would create an incentive for people to avoid working, because otherwise they would have to start paying for the things they were previously being given for free.
The Business Economy
If you are providing a service to someone else and receiving money from the government for doing so, then you are a business. This part of the economy would work similar to the economy that we have today, with the exception that you can now rely on the fact that literally everyone you see is a potential customer that could afford your service. You no longer need to feel guilty about trying to maximize your profits when selling goods and services to people who do not have very much money. Landlords never need to evict tenants for being unable to pay rent. Many online services which are supported in the current economy by showing advertisements could remove the ads and rely on this system instead.
Conclusion
This is all I have to say about this topic for now. I may update this page if I have more ideas or want to add more clarifications.
Last Update: 2026-06-12