The advent of currency prompted unethical people to seek great fortune at the expense of others, I believe.
Are you honestly trying to suggest that, before currency, there were no looters or moochers? Because I would contend that, since the dawn of mankind, there have been some individuals willing to use force, coercion, and trickery, to confiscate property that rightly belongs to someone else.
Imagine a country where everyone spent every penny they make. This is the most robust economy imaginable- when people spend, companies hire to cover the extra business they're getting. In this type of economy, it is difficult to imagine that significant unemployment would exist at all. Since income taxes are a percentage of income, the government benefits from this type of economy, too.
Any arguments?
It's not really an argument so much as an observation....
Begging the question is a type of logical fallacy in which a proposition relies on an implicit premise within itself to establish the truth of that same proposition. In other words, it is a statement that refers to its own assertion to prove the assertion.
You're premise is that consumption drives an economy and, therefore, having 100% consumption would create the best possible economy is not logical. Goods must be produced
before they can be consumed. Increases in consumption must be preceded by increases in production, we cannot consume more than has been produced, and such an increase in production is only possible through savings and investments, i.e. through the accumulation of wealth. That wealth serves as the capital by which new products and techniques are researched and, if efficacious, adopted.
“Economic growth” means the rise of an economy’s productivity, due to the discovery of new products, new techniques, which means: due to the achievements of men’s productive ability. - Ayn Rand
Now, depending on your definition of "spending", it could be said that we already have an economy very much like the one you've described - Thanks to wealth. The savings of one individual is the credit line for another, as is the case when I put money into a bank. The bank takes my money and lends it out to someone else so they can spend it now but repay the loan with interest over time. In the case of investments, the money I've placed into mutual funds serves as a capital stream for the underlying corporations whose stocks and bonds are purchased with my money. Those companies can then use my capital to expand their business and/or upgrade their existing facilities.
Savings and investments represent a volitional, and therefore
moral, redistribution of wealth. My savings and investments serve to help grow the economy, and if I'm lucky, my personal wealth will grow along with it. The other form of wealth redistribution is the kind that's done at the hands of the state, it is not volitional, it is forced and therefore immoral. Government takes my money and pisses it away on whatever it likes and, rather than seeing my wealth grow, it's simply gone. The looters, from firms like Solyndra, walk away with millions of our tax dollars while the moochers, from firms like AIG and GM, get to avoid bankruptcy (for a little while anyway) all thanks to the money government took, by threat of force, from taxpayers like me.
On the front end of wealth redistribution is wealth accumulation, and the proposed front end "solution" is equally immoral. The rationale for having government attempt to limit the accumulation of wealth through Progressive taxation is based on the demonstrably false and flawed premise that savings and investments, i.e. wealth, are forever removed from the economy once it's in the hands of a single individual. The cartoon caricature is one of Scrooge McDuck "hoarding" his millions in a personal vault where he can swim in it but nobody else derives any benefit from the wealth he has accumulated. Reality is far different.
The richest billionaire is helping millions of people by virtue of simply having that wealth. Yet such people are irrationally condemned as being "selfish and greedy" by the looters and moochers who either do not understand how economies work or wish to forcibly confiscate that wealth for their own "selfish and greedy" desires. Whether it's sitting in a bank collecting interest or earning dividends from investments, his wealth is already being redistributed - by his own volition - to people who borrow it, or use it as capital, in their own personal pursuit of happiness and, if they're lucky, to create their own wealth.
So... The best possible economy:
The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. - Ayn Rand
