Value is like beauty. It’s all in the eye of the beholder. Maybe, to someone, somewhere it really is worth $20,000 to see someone eat steaming bullshit. That’s individual liberty for you!

The benefits to wider society are still immense. The vast majority of consumption is not on frivolity such as this. Even if it is, remember that spending is income. The money you spend on the things you want to consume goes into someone else’s pocket, giving that person new power to consume.

Now, on a planet with finite resources, I get the point that eventually you’ll hit some hard limits. For important things like food, we create buffer stocks to cover bad harvests. At least, rich countries do responsible stuff like that.

As I understood Austrian economics, it teaches that artificially increasing the money supply creates price inflation, which it vehemently opposes, so it favours a gold standard. That’s why I said Austrians argue that monetary inflation corresponds perfectly to price inflation. What you said doesn’t contradict that, save for pointing out that official inflation measures tend not to measure the main sources of monetary inflation (ie house prices).

To an Austrian economist, the most important problem to avoid is price distortion. That to me is a value judgement.

I would argue that there are a number of problems which are all interconnected. A good economic policy, to me, is one that reflects the priorities of the people, whilst mitigating as effectively as possible problems like unemployment, inflation, deflation, the need for effective national defence, the prospect of foundational economic sectors like agriculture not functioning correctly, failure to keep up with international competitors in the advance of technology, environmental degradation, social unrest etc

In other words, a good economic policy is indistiguishable from a good political policy. I think. Bearing in mind that solving one or more of those problems may likely exacerbate others, to me it’s a balancing act that depends on your priorities. Mine are national defence, innovation/technological progress, social stability and individual liberty, probably in that order of preference.