The economy has two components - today and the future. Today, we decide who gets what stuff. Then the people who have most of the stuff decide what to create for the future.
The bridge isn't free - the resources needed to build the bridge (time, steel, engineering attention, government attention, etc, etc) are being reallocated from someone else who would have used the resources to do something. If the bridge is more productive than whatever the person the money came from wanted then there will be more stuff in the future and prosperity likely increases.
The problem with money printing is it is all but impossible to figure out where the resources are being reallocated from - with taxes it is fairly obvious. With money printing it is not. It may well be impossible to say what we lost to get the bridge built because we can't figure out what would have happened if the money had not been printed.
>>"The problem with money printing is it is all but impossible to figure out where the resources are being reallocated from - with taxes it is fairly obvious. With money printing it is not. It may well be impossible to say what we lost to get the bridge built because we can't figure out what would have happened if the money had not been printed. "
It seems to me that, following your logic, if you don't "print the money", it's also impossible to know what would have happened if the money have been printed.
The bridge isn't free - the resources needed to build the bridge (time, steel, engineering attention, government attention, etc, etc) are being reallocated from someone else who would have used the resources to do something. If the bridge is more productive than whatever the person the money came from wanted then there will be more stuff in the future and prosperity likely increases.
The problem with money printing is it is all but impossible to figure out where the resources are being reallocated from - with taxes it is fairly obvious. With money printing it is not. It may well be impossible to say what we lost to get the bridge built because we can't figure out what would have happened if the money had not been printed.