Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)

Doesn't this argument break down fairly quickly when you take into consideration information asymmetry between actors.

Let's imagine you are providing future options to Congolese farmers, but you know you can poison the water supply and cause specific crops to fail. In this situation you, you sell the Congolese farmer a contract stating that he will sell his crop for a specific price while you know the constrained supply will increase the price to absurd levels.

Know you just got a bunch of money and yes you provided "value" to the farmer but at the cost of everyone else.

Some people earn money by doing literally nothing but essentially clicking “Buy these stocks” and leaving it alone for years.

It seems more like a personal cry that they don’t find the work fulfilling, but it’s far and away from earning something for nothing.

  For one, you could simply hand the pile of cash out to the first person who comes by your window. 
  Or you might hand small amounts of cash to a bunch of different people. 
  Both of these seem like nice things to do. But then you wonder: what if the cash in your living room is counterfeit? More to the point — does it even matter? 
  Wherever the money came from, if you dump it through the window, you'll be helping a few people, but at the same time causing inflation that will hurt everyone else.

The key issue with this entire blog post is that it ignores the distribution of wealth within the hypothetical Congolese market. What if one person in the marketplace has 99% of the money, and everybody else has the rest evenly divided between them. Then under some moral/ethical frameworks it might be beneficial to distribute the money evenly to the rest of the population at the cost of inflating away some of the single rich person's wealth.

What you do with the money affects the distribution of wealth & goods within the society. What is a good distribution? You need a moral/ethical framework to decide. I won't make an assumption on which one we go with, but lets say we go with one.

Not spending or donating the money is making the choice that the distribution of wealth as it currently exists is the most optimal. Is this just? Depends on your moral/ethical framework.

Saying that earning is good and spending is bad is overly simplistic. You need an objective function on the distribution of wealth. Earning money in a way that warps the distribution away from the ideal can then be considered bad (and thus should be 'corrected' via taxation and other methods) and spending money in a way that warps the distribution toward the ideal can be considered good and should be rewarded (via tax credits etcetera).

The whole article is a defence of the principle of actual hoarding as opposed to investment though, hence the author's expression of concern that spending the money might generate inflation, their focus on intertemporal arbitrage with assets rather than lending, and their contention that taking an asset out of circulation and profiting from its future price fall represents a tangible "time-shifting" service performed on the asset. Those who have read more mainstream economics and less Austrian economics would argue that any value generated (as opposed to rent extracted) comes not from what is withdrawn from circulation but from the advance of cash to the grain vendors who might be able to make better use of it than they could the unsold grain: the time value of money comes from allowing money to circulate towards those willing to invest in productive activity, not from withdrawing it from circulation. A corollary of the emphasis on circulation of money rather than withdrawal of goods is that whilst buying a yacht might be far from the best thing you could do for the Congoese people, creating a whole load of boatbuilding jobs (which in turn sees more goods spending and more production to meet increased spending) is likely still better for Congoese economic development than keeping the money you'd received from trading in their economy under your bed.